Questions about a cure's effect on people

When I checked my referer logs on Friday, I saw that quite a few people found their way to this blog looking for discussion about how the new movie X-Men III: The Last Stand might relate to autism. Most people found me through various search terms, but my post More thoughts on autism inspired by the X-Men trilogy was also linked to from “X-Men” and Disability Rights at specialchildren.about.com. (That article also points to A ‘Last Stand’ against cure, a bit more academic take on the issue).

I finally saw the movie yesterday, and as an X-Men fan I wasn’t disappointed. I don’t want to get into any specifics from the movie yet; I’d hate to spoil anything for people who are planning to see it. But I did come away from it with a few questions about autism cures that I hadn’t really thought of before. (These questions all assume that a cure exists.)

• How many autistics would take the cure? (Though most writing by autistics that I’ve come across seems to be anti-cure, I can’t imagine that there are not pro-cure autistics out there.)
  
• How would autistics who choose to be cured be viewed/treated by autistics who choose not to be cured?
  
• How would a pro-cure parent of an autistic child feel about their child who chose not to be cured?
  
• How would an anti-cure parent of an autistic child feel about their child who chose to be cured?
  
• How do autistics feel about their pro- / anti- cure parents?

Unlike autism, which typically presents very early in life, in the world of the X-Men the “change” from human to mutant occurs at puberty, after the child has had a chance to experience what a “normal” life is. Subsequently, these mutants have an experiential basis for making a personal decision to be ‘cured’ or not that it seems to me autistics don’t have. Just a thought.

tagged as: Autism, Asperger's Syndrome, X-Men