Simon Baron-Cohen on the Prospect of a Prenatal Test for Autism

by Kristina Chew · 2009-01-07 04:07:00 UTC
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Our list of top 10 controversies has continued to generate discussion and in this post I bring up controversy #3, "Support vs. cure":

The idea of "cure" is tied to the medical model of disability which holds that a person with a disability is "sick" and needs to be "cured;" some internal flaw has "caused" the disability. This is the perspective still taken by popular culture and many autism organizations.

In today's BBC News "leading autism expert" professor Simon Baron-Cohen talks about "curing autism"---and some of the ethical issues raised by this notion---along with another controversial, or perhaps simply inflammatory, topic, the possibility of a prenatal test for autism. Noting that "males, maths and autism" are linked---as he writes, males are "so attracted to studying maths" and individuals on the autism spectrum are more likely to be male---Baron-Cohen asks, what if, in "preventing" the number of children diagnosed with autism, we also "reduced" the number of "great mathematicians"? He writes:

....if [a prenatal] test [for autism] led to some kind of prenatal treatment, such as the use of drugs to block the effect of testosterone which is already medically possible, would this be desirable?

If reducing the testosterone in a foetus helped that baby's future social development, we would all be delighted.

But what if such a treatment reduced that baby's future ability to attend to details, and to understand systematic information like maths?

Caution is needed before scientists embrace prenatal testing so that we do not inadvertently repeat the history of eugenics or inadvertently 'cure' not just autism but the associated talents that are not in need of treatment.

I'd say that more than a little caution is needed, not to mention some hard thinking about what we consider a talent that is "not in need of treatment." Must such a talent only include being "good at mathematics"?

Kristina Chew
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