This is the sort of story I find it nigh on impossible not to get angry and scared about. Stephanie Rochester allegedly killed her 6 month old child because she thought he might have autism.
According to an affidavit seeking her arrest, Rochester wanted to commit suicide but didn’t want to “burden her husband” with the potentially autistic boy.
There aren’t words for how sickening this is. I feel personally attacked by this woman that she should attempt to make autism responsible for the death of her child rather than shouldering the blame herself. My own autistic child and step child and all other autistic people deserve better than this cheap attempt at buck passing.
And really one has to examine the social atmosphere this kind of thing takes place in. Who gave this person and her attorney the idea that autism is such an awful awful thing that a jury might see past her culpability and accept that it was OK to place blame on autism itself? I know I have my own ideas about this.
I was moved by the love of a mother must have for her child to take his life rather than him fall upon a society that really didn’t give a damn.
Left Brain Right Brain 
Unless you are user “Sullivan” your post has been ripped off:
http://www.opposingviews.com/i/boulder-mom-stephanie-rochester-kills-her-baby-blames-autism
“Sullivan” seems to have taken much of his/her material straight from this blog.
Its OK, Opposing Views have our permission to repost LBRB 🙂
Argh! I wish I had language to phrase what this story does to me. More to the point, I wish this story didn’t exist.
Tsu Dho Nimh,
I think opposing views is putting everything from here as being from me. Interesting.
My question to Mr. Wakefield based on his comment–what is he doing to make the world give a damn? Appearing onstage to the strains of “Vaccine Gestapo” to defend his unethical behavior isn’t going to accomplish that goal. Not even a little.
Here’s a link to some video from this news story
http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/34762914001?isVid=1
I agree that this sort of thing is sickening.
In my not so humble opinion, persons that can murder a child-their own child no less, will do so. They will find a reason/excuse. She is using autism as her legal defense, because of the publicity right now concerning autism.
Abusers are quite inventive at finding something about their victims to blame and absolve them of wrong doing.
Just because in this case it is a child the mother claims was autistic does not change anything.
This woman killed her six-month son because of selfishness. She thought that raising the chid would greatly impinge on her fun. It would inconvenience her. The whole thing strikes me as so abhorrent, that I wonder about the woman’s sanity.
I have an 11 year old son who they say is “borderline autistic” (PDD-NOS to be specific) and I can still clearly remember the outright denial and then the devastation and “punched in the gut” feeling I got when my sons doctors, teachers and finally several specialists told me that there was something wrong with my little boy. It was like I could see the bright future and all the possibilities I had hoped for my son were all slipping away with the word AUTISM. I was told my beautiful child would never be able to function past a very young preschool level. I was also told that he would never speak, would probably never even be able to dress himself, he would never learn to read or be able to do even the simplest tasks without help. I was sad for him but not for me, parents might not have the easiest road when you have a special needs child but what kind of sick individual murders a baby in cold blood to make life easier for a third party? How dare anyone say that an autistic child is so much of a burden that they deserve to die! I won’t say its easy because it’s not. And he is the sweetest brightest little guy you are ever going to see. And watching him try so hard to control his impulses and learn to behave is the best feeling ever. My point is that you never know what a person is capable of and this woman never even gave her baby a chance. And whoever said “normal” is better? And why do they get to say they are better anyway?
This is an example of why the attitudes about autistic people really need to change.
Why couldn’t she have given me that child instead?
Synesthesia:
Because, after reading a couple other news stories on her, she seemed to have a severe case of postpartum depression and other mental issues. She had worked with autistic children, and this seemed to feed into her delusions. Even clouding the fact that no six-month baby can be diagnosed with autism.
It is horribly sad.
Chris,
I’d be very wary about attributing any mental health condition to this person until we know a lot more.
That is why I linked to the news story. But I should have worded it better. Some of the news stories say she herself claimed to have some postpartum depression.
Perhaps it is my reaction to the horrible way she did it (going back and putting more blankets on his head), and the fact that she was told by doctors that he was developing normally… and the fact that there is no way to diagnose a six-month old baby!
In no way, shape, or form am I condoning or justifying this. There is no legal or rational or justifiable reason for someone to do this to their child or to any child. However, there are evolved reasons why a mother would commit infanticide. Under sufficient metabolic stress in the postpartum period, female mammals will kill their young. This is a “feature”, to shed the metabolic load of lactation when it is unsustainable (my hypothesis). I am quite sure that postpartum depression results from metabolic stress that is slightly less severe. If a woman is experiencing postpartum depression, that can very easily progress into postpartum psychosis. Postpartum depression should always be treated as the life-threatening condition that it is by everyone. If it transitions into postpartum psychosis, the mother becomes psychotic and is not capable of reliable care taking of herself or her infant, no matter how lucid she seems.
I think that children on the autism spectrum are more likely to be victims of infanticide because the threshold for infanticide is lower due to the xenophobia that people on the autism spectrum can induce in NTs.
http://daedalus2u.blogspot.com/2010/03/physiology-behind-xenophobia.html
This xenophobia is the cause of the “better dead than autistic” meme, and is why it is so dangerous, it lowers the threshold for mothers to kill their autistic children, or as I think in this case, the rationalization to commit infanticide. As the report says, this child was 6 months old. That is too young for autism symptoms to be apparent. I suspect that it was postpartum psychosis and the psychosis gave her the delusion that her child was autistic to allow her the rationalization that she should kill it.
Here is a recent story
Apparently the mother piled blankets on the baby and went downstairs to discuss vacation plans with her husband.
She got up later and placed more blankets on the baby.
Time to state the obvious: This happened in Boulder, which is a center of anti-vaccine activism. It appears they may be responsible for more than pertussis outbreaks.
Kev, Sullivan,
It’s happened again.
http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/autism-parents-say-mother-who-snapped-needed-help/19564542