Left Brain Right Brain

The McCarron family and the Leitch family have become close over the last few weeks. We have never met. We have never heard each others voices. We have only seen pictures of each other and communicated by email but in that communication has been a sharing of warmth, emotion and desire to connect such as some people never seem to get in their lives. We have swapped addresses as well as photos and they know should they ever want to come to the UK they have a home here. We know that the reverse is true also.

And yet I wish it wasn’t so. A part of me heartily wishes I’d never spoken with Mike. I’m sure he feels the same. This is because of the circumstances that led to us meeting. The murder of his granddaughter, Katie McCarron. If I could ensure a return to life in the arms of her dad, sister and grandparents by swapping that for the friendship of one of the kindest, bravest families I’ve ever met then I would do it in an heartbeat.

Mike refuses to see Katie portrayed as a burden, or as someone in pain. This is because she wasn’t. He also refuses to let people directly or indirectly attempt to absolve Katie’s killer by making murder the responsibility of an uncaring society. This is because it wasn’t. It was murder.

Recently, Stephen Drake of Not Dead Yet, wrote a press release calling for restraint when reporting these kind of murders – i.e. murders of disabled kids.

Researcher Dick Sobsey has documented an increase in the murders of children by their parents in Canada in relation to well-publicized and sympathetic coverage of the murders of children with disabilities. Articles about the alleged murder of a person with a disability should not contain more about the disability than about the victim as a person. More space should be devoted to grieving family members than sympathetic friends of the accused killer.

And yet, yesterday, the Chicago Tribune released a piece of journalism that can be best described as callow.

The piece starts off by portraying members of the mercury/autism connection as the inheritors of the sort of stigma that those who actually were persecuted by Bettlehiem underwent:

It has been nearly 50 years since mothers shouldered the blame for their children’s autism. Yet for many parents, echoes of that painful era remain……

In the 1950s and ’60s, the medical community accepted University of Chicago psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim’s assessment that “refrigerator mothers”–those with a supposedly cold, unloving demeanor–brought on their children’s disorder.

Although we now know that autism is a neurological disorder and not the result of bad parenting, the exact cause remains a mystery.

Many parents, however, are convinced they’ve found the answer. And most experts are on the opposing side.

Indeed, few medical battles are more charged than that between parents who believe mercury in their children’s vaccines brought on autism and the medical establishment that has found no evidence to support that claim.

Where the ground really starts to shift is the next association made – that it was this society induced guilt that led poor heroic Karen McCarron into killing her vaccine-injured ‘heavy toll’ inducing daughter.

Some who knew McCarron through her work with an autism support group say the physician blamed herself for allowing her daughter to be vaccinated, and feared that the available remedies wouldn’t make enough of an improvement to her daughter’s quality of life. Others suggest that perhaps working among other doctors skeptical of the vaccine connection created an emotional tug of war for McCarron

I think I know Mike well enough now to be absolutely sure that he and his family would be _outraged_ at these utterly vacuous statements. To besmirch the memory of Katie McCarron by trying to empathise with her murdering mother and to try and absolve her and by implication blame the mainstream medical community is appalling.

In fact, the reverse is almost certainly true – the utter hopelessness that groups such as Autism Speaks like to foment are much more likely to have led to any depression Katie’s murderer might’ve had. And if she felt that vaccines caused her daughters autism then she long ago crossed the line into quackery. In this case, fatal quackery. There is still absolutely zero evidence that vaccines cause autism. Anyone – and I mean _anyone_ who has had a hand in perpetuating that myth bears some responsibility for the murder of Katie McCarron.

On the 22nd of June, Kellie A. Waremburg attempted to kill her four year old daughter. Thankfully she failed. Her daughter has cerebral palsy.

Shortly afterwards, the same barrage of testimonials commenting on how good a mother Waremburg was came out and how difficult it is to parent a child with cerebral palsy:

“She’s always been a good mom. She’s always interacting with her (daughter),” said next-door neighbor Katie Gardiner.

Families face challenges, there’s no question about it. Children have varying degrees of impairment. For some families, there is a minimal impact to families who need to take every aspect of their child’s care – feed them, dress them, toilet them,” said Morgan, who also is the chief of the section of child development within the Department of Pediatrics at University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria.

So? So what? Get over it, get on with it. If you can’t, then hand your child over to family members or social services and let someone who doesn’t put themselves first get on with it.

I want to clue these killer parents and those parents and groups who ‘understand’ killer parents into something: Your child is not your property. You have no rights over them. You have an obligation to parent them, love them, feed them, clothe them, teach them and let them be who they are. When you have a child, you put yourself last. If your career suffers – that’s not their fault. If you can’t go out as much as you used to – that’s not their fault. If money is a problem – that’s not their fault. Stop transferring your unhappiness about the way your life has changed into excuses for killing, or understanding the killers of, children.

I’ve had two themes running through this blog of late. One is this one – the murder of disabled children. The other one is what’s going on at the Judge Rotenberg Centre where electric skin shock is used to punish autistic and non-autistic students. People who believe in the concept of neurodiversity have been outraged and blogged both of these events continuously and thoroughly.

There is however, one section of people who has remained utterly and totally silent on both issues. The self styled ‘autism community’ who perpetuate the ongoing myth of vaccines causing autism.

Autism Speaks released a short movie about the horrors of having to live life with an autistic child. I’ve seen no movies about the JRC, or investigations into electric shocks for autistic people.

The NAA who regularly (and falsely) denounce good science and promote bad released a damp squib of an online petition and then fell totally silent on the issue.

Safe Minds? Nothing.

ACHAMP? Nothing.

These, don’t forget, are the people who call themselves the autism community. Seems to me like they care about one issue and one issue only.

And how about the anti-mercury bloggers? The grass-roots ‘autism community’.

Adventures in Autism? Nothing.

UPDATE: Ginger informs me that she’s temporarily not blogging at all and hadn’t even heard of Katie McCarron. In this light, it doesn’t seem fair to place AiA here.

Injecting Sense? Nothing.

Whilst these people continue their obsession with trying to find some kind of spurious link between vaccines and autism the world continues to turn. Whilst they present themselves to politicians and media outlets as the autism community, the world continues to turn. Whilst they attend single issue conferences, the world continues to turn.

Unless you’re Katie McCarron. Then the world doesn’t turn at all.

Unless you’re Lexus Fuller. Her world is shattered as she must grow up knowing her mum tried to kill her.

Unless you’re a student at the JRC where the world and time must appear to stand still as you are electrocuted for non-compliance.