It says so much about how our society treats the neurodivergent that it's considered a non-extreme opinion that a dead child is preferable to an autistic one.

Pretty sure the parents weren’t expecting a 50-50 shot of cure vs death. The medical staff downplaying risk and ignoring issues seems like the bigger problem especially for a developmental procedure. If they represented the risk as 1 in 10000 I would probably take those odds. If the actual risk was 1 in 5 and they didn’t convey that it’s pretty messed up.

Getting in your car has risk, so does riding a bike. They shouldn’t be coin flips.

You should try being the parent of a seriously autistic child. I'd put a large chunk of cash down that most parents of severely autistic children wish their child had never been born. There's no upside, it basically ruins your life. Every interaction is a reminder of what you will never have, and what you will have to suffer through for the rest of your life.

That's not what happened here. The team was too ambitious and not careful enough but they were not trying to kill the child.

I just don't think there is any reason to put that additional context into what happened here.

Neurodivergency, or whatever you might call it, sucks, at least during childhood. Ten times so in a family-centered society. I had a mild enough case to grow up functional and independent, but if not for that… I totally see how one might chose a risky treatment even when fully informed. The problem here, it looks like the consent was nowhere informed enough, and the research team chose not to publish the case after it turned out a failure.

The article clearly points out that it wasn't autism for which Mei was treated, but Snijders Blok–Campeau syndrome, of which autism is just a single symptom. That goes way beyond neurodivergency.

> It says so much about how our society treats the neurodivergent that it's considered a non-extreme opinion that a dead child is preferable to an autistic one.

They did not set out to kill the child. And the autism wasn't even the biggest issue. The issue is the developmental delays that were expected to compound the more the brain was left untreated.

This seems to be a rather extreme takeaway..?

It was a genetic disorder. Stop with the silly labeling.

I hear this meme sometimes, that anti-vaxxers and others "prefer a dead child to an autistic one," and I think it fundamentally doesn't represent their thought process at all.

The far-more common sentiment that I see among anti-vaxxers is that the risk of death from childhood diseases like chicken pox are either zero or close-to-it, and that the risk of receiving autism from the vaccine is at least one-in-ten. These numbers aren't true, of course, but in their minds, they're weighing a negligible-chance of terrible outcome against a moderate chance of bad outcome.

I'm sure there's a few extremists of course, who would say they prefer a dead child to an autistic one (same as how some parents feel about gay kids), but it does not represent most of the people in these movements.