Yeah I'm curious if the negative effects of autism could be due to the brain physically running out of space and getting "compressed?"
It reminds me of trepanation, the old-school mental health procedure to just drill a hole in the skull. Some people still do it and swear by it [0], saying that it relieves pressure.
Autism is a sensory processing disorder in which your brain receives too much stimulus. This it makes sense it would occur when you have too many neurons (or connections) as that would cause increased response to any external stimulus.
Well, it seems logical that any "overgrowth" would need more space - but it looks like our skulls are malleable and continue to fuse into adulthood. I wonder if there's a process where they grow to the size needed by the brain?
TIL that our heads grow by about ~8% (in circumference) after we're tweens [0]. Cool!
That's... complicated. There are multiple opinions about aborting fetuses that test positive for Down's syndrome. For one, the tests aren't always accurate. For two, people with Down's syndrome can live fulfilling lives, and have spoken out against the practice. But also it does place an additional burden on parents, and parenting well is already a hard job.
But I don't think it's a reasonable comparison -- autism has a much wider variability in how it expresses, from relatively benign (but still impactful) to fully incapable of self sufficiency.
I'd also argue just because we practice eugenics in case makes it ok to generalize to other cases (and furthermore, just because we practice it doesn't necessarily make it ok even in that case).
People abort babies for reasons far less than "lifelong disability requiring constant care". I'm not saying it's done lightly but surely that kind of issue is as valid a reason as any.
If its not genetic, which autism isn't, then it has nothing to do with eugenics. People have the right to choose how they raise children, trying to dictate that is much more similar to eugenics imo
Your claim that ASD is not genetic is extraordinary and counter to the prevailing scientific understanding, and requires significant evidence to back up.
Would be super cool if there could be found a way to enlarge the skull size during growth to have enough space for that special autism brains.