A young man is rushed into a New York City ER suffering from internal
injuries. The situation is desperate, and the ER physician soon
decides he must call on the city's top surgeon to operate.
Unfortunately, upon arrival at the ICU, the surgeon says this:

"I cannot operate on this patient. He is my son."

And yet the surgeon is not the boy's father. The riddle is this:
Who is the surgeon?

I will reveal the answer right away, because this riddle has been
around a long time, and I'm sure everyone already knows the answer.
The surgeon is the young man's mother.

I'm posting this because it is pertinent to the current discussion.
Perla is right that American sexism has made life miserable for women
through the decades. Both men and women have been programmed to
automatically discount the possiblity that a woman could be the
city's top surgeon. On top of that; being the mother of an autistic
child has increased the misery and burden of being a woman. To make
matters worse, Bettelheim gave rise to the suspicion that mothers
actually caused their child's autism.

The other thing that makes the riddle pertinent is the fact that the
mother could not operate on her son. This is because surgeons never
operate on people they love. There is too much risk that the surgeon
will become distracted by personal issues. A good surgeon needs to
be clear-headed and totally objective in order to minimize risk.

In the situation of autism, there are two opposing currents crashing
into each other creating an insurmountable freak wave dilemma. On
the one hand, researchers must be very careful of the feelings of
autistics' mothers, because nobody wishes to harm such extremely
vulnerable beings. On the other hand, if researchers take those
mothers' feelings into account, they are abandoning their
objectivity, thereby risking the well being of the children.

I happen to think the children should come first. I think the
mothers too should try and tough it out.

Larry