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The ASAN blog includes personal stories of acceptance, self-advocacy, and community, with a particular focus on showing the lived impact of our work.

And Straight On Till Morning

| Meg Evans
by Meg Evans The stories that we tell our children from their earliest days determine the course of their lives.  So it has always been with humankind, ever since bright-eyed children gathered in the firelight to hear the hunters’ tales of the grand sagas painted on the cave walls,...

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Autism Acceptance Month Essay

| Carol Quirk
by Carol Quirk I once thought autism meant a lot of inabilities: cannot talk, cannot switch topics, cannot give eye contact, cannot handle transitions or new routines, cannot read social cues, cannot control motor movements, etc. And I once thought some of the can-dos were not necessarily “adaptive” (as...

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The Judge Rotenberg Center on Trial, Part 3

| Shain Neumeier
by Shain Neumeier The trial over the restraint and electric shock of Andre McCollins at the Judge Rotenberg Center continued for a full day on 13 April, and included the conclusion of the plaintiff’s case alleging medical malpractice and the beginning of the defendants’ case to refute this claim. ...

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The Judge Rotenberg Center on Trial, Part Two

| Shain Neumeier
by Shain Neumeier The medical malpractice case against the Judge Rotenberg Center (JRC) continued on Thursday with the continued cross-examination of the McCollins family’s expert witness, psychiatrist Dr. Marc Whaley.  Edward Hinchey, the attorney representing JRC employee Dr. James Riley, was questioning the witness for most of the day,...

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The Judge Rotenberg Center on Trial, Part One

| admin
by Shain Neumeier Almost ten years after Andre McCollins was restrained facedown for seven hours and shocked 31 times over that interval while attending the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center (JRC) in Canton, Massachusetts, the lawsuit against the program and some of its most important staff for these abuses, McCollins...

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It’s Autism Sunday (Pity Party at Church)

| MegEvans
by Kate Gladstone   It’s Autism Sunday, that one day a year We welcome in fellowship “those folks” ’round here. We pray to become more autistic-aware On this one special Sunday: the rest, we don’t care. We’ll pray for you all, you’re the cause of the week: But please...

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The Debate About Euthanasia

| admin
by Lateef H McLeod on DisabilityRightNow Recently there has been a resurgence of debate of whether or not euthanasia is a viable ethical option for people with disabilities. Proponents of euthanasia stress that since all Americans have the right to life and have the authority of how to end...

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All Done Autism Awareness

| admin
by Shannon Des Roches Rosa There’s a saying we overuse in my household: “All done, !” We’ve actually swiped the saying from our son Leo, who is eleven and autistic, as “all done” is what he proclaims when he is completely fed up with the activity or person at...

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Killing Words

| admin
by Zoe Gross Let me present to you a sequence of events. On March 6th, a 22-year-old autistic man named George Hodgins was murdered in Sunnyvale, California. His mother, Elizabeth, pulled out a gun, shot him point-blank, and then killed herself. In the following days and weeks, journalists wrote...

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Plants Outside the Shade

| admin
by Amanda Baggs   This is a personal description of some of what autism means to me. Because even among other autistic people such descriptions are too rare. Autism means that my earliest memories are of floating in among the feel of things.  Not how they looked or sounded,...

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