The Trump administration’s approach to autism is tangled up with ableism, eugenics, and pronatalism

President Trump and health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have characterized the rise in autism diagnoses in recent years as an epidemic requiring emergency intervention.

This approach is factually wrong: The broadening definition of autism and the improvement in diagnosis in the same time period is largely responsible for the rise. But it’s worse than a simple factual error. Using this framing dehumanizes autistic people in ways that echo the eugenic policies of the early 20th century and is just the latest iteration of politicizing and codifying harmful eugenic frameworks.

Eugenic policies originally sought to improve society by enriching good genes through selective breeding strategies co-opted from agricultural practices and applied to human populations. Inherent in these policies was a hierarchical worth of human traits, a ranking and designation of some lives as not worth living. The Trump administration is reviving eugenic thinking, most recently by targeting autistic people as undesirable lives to be purged from society whether by restricting acetaminophen use during pregnancy (even though the data does not support such a connection), withholding vaccines from children (even though ...