To think a lot of MN are ableist?

[Sweetlifeofyours]

So I wasn’t going to post but as a mum with a disabled child myself I feel like I have to get things off my chest. I have read a couple of threads over the past week or so regarding mothers who are looking for advice and support for their disabled child/children (2 that stick out to me)

I was very sad to see that there were only a few posters who actually gave support and advice to the OP’s. The rest were in my opinion, downright rude and nasty and clearly just wanted to upset the OP’s even more for whatever reason.

As a mum with a SEN child, it is incredibly difficult and I myself don’t always get the correct help and support I need so to come on here and see that other women/parents show their (somewhat) true opinions of disabled children upset me.

I am completely 100% on board that autism shouldn’t be an excuse for everything, but surely some compassion wouldn’t go amiss to a struggling parent.

One of the worst things I read was a poster saying to the OP that they should make sure their child doesn’t turn into a sex offender because he enjoys hugs. Says more to me about the poster rather than the OP and their child.

I guess my AIBU is, do you think people (maybe especially on here) should have more compassion for the disabled community or have you read threads where you agree with the majority of comments (especially where we are talking about young children)?

Yes, devastating. I dont know how parents like you coped. My friend always said, I'm not coping, I'm just carrying on.

I hope both you and your son are doing well now.

Honestly, you just don't have a choice. You get thrown into this new world of chemotherapy and central lines and neutropenia and signing consent forms which include risks of the chemotherapy causing heart failure and a secondary cancer in the future but if they don't have it? The current cancer will kill them and you want to hide from the world and scream WHY MY CHILD? but that child, your child is scared and asking if they are going to die and they need you and you are there for them and all of a sudden it becomes your new normal.

He's been in remission for just over a year now, he's disabled due to some horrendous complications but he's amazing and wonderful and HERE which is all that matters. He's coping well considering how different his life is now. I'm incredibly proud of him.

All I can say is Fuck Cancer.
Xxxx

I've read a lot of posts by @Kirbert2 about her child. Absolutely heartbreaking

Was anybody else not able to get onto MN? Hopefully it was due to them banning all the ableists. Doubt it though😒

Hear hear!

Let me know when we're back to discussing ablism, not going on about someone's mad fantasy thread hijack.

Yes, sorry about getting caught up in the hijack. I won’t answer that poster again. I also want to discuss ableism, after our negative experiences with high school and the criticisms from well-meaning family members.

Absolutely!

i could talk to you ALL day about that kind of general crap after dealing with 2 kids with AuDHD who're now both at College.

It was Cloudfare which is a network used by several websites, apps etc a lot of things were down including X but it's all sorted now by the looks of it.

Cloudflare down LIVE: X, Spotify, ChatGPT, Mumsnet and Bet365 suffer outage - Mirror Online

Well I don’t know about you lot, but I think Dick Lice’s little tantrum about ear defenders in school was a fine example of the type of ableism we’re confronted with daily on here.

Kids with sensory issues using reasonable adjustments to access education: <shakes fist>

Thousands of SEN kids having no education at all: <crickets>

I am loathed to engage with you again and potentially further derail an important discussion about ableism on MN but I just could not let this go unanswered. If I were you I would have taken my suggestion that you were involved in an elaborate satire and used it as your 'get out of jail free' card. Admitting you were playing a grotesque comic character would have saved you the intense embarrassment of admitting that your ridiculous, ignorant and offensive posts are actually for real.
Laying aside your claims to have enjoyed a career in the financial sector while simultaneously seeming to have no idea how our economy works and profering the kind of poorly thought out 'solution' a drunk down the pub would have been ashamed to slur out to their mates after a dozen pints, your views on disabled children are absolutely chilling.
Who are you to declare that disabled children's lives are not worth living? What gives you the right to state that they are less valuable than your life?
I was born severely physically disabled, with the kind of disabilities that heartless and ignorant people like you, lacking any imagination, would probably have thought would mean I would never do anything worthwhile. Luckily, my wonderful parents didn't hold such horrifying views and fought tooth and nail to give me the best education and childhood possible. As a result I excelled academically at school, received a first class degree from a top university, have a rewarding job I love, own my own home and, most importantly, am very happily married with a perfect baby.
I have a great life which is absolutely worthwhile and I am forever grateful that appalling eugenicists like yourself weren't in power when I was born to decide that I was going to be just too expensive to support and would never amount to anything.
What is frightening is that, given you are posting on here, there is a good chance you are a parent, possibly a grandparent. This causes me to fear for your family in the event any of them were to be born or become disabled, which, please remember, can happen to anyone at any time. I hope that seeing someone close to you experiencing the challenges associated with disability may cause you to develop some belated compassion, as it has done for so many others who showed no empathy for disabled people until disability came knocking on their door. However, maybe your humanity, like your spelling, is another skill you have let slip since you quit working.

There is danger in judging parents who continue a pregnancy with a severely disabled child as better than those that exercise their right to terminate.

I guess it really depends what compassion involves. My kids don't have to be friends or play with people who are unkind to them. They also do not have to tolerate being touched by anyone. Thet are entitled to their boundaries and trier body autonomy. If that means they are less than compassionate to someone else then so be it. There safety and comfort is more important than someone else's hurt feelings. I'm saying that from the prospective of a mum of a child with suspected ADHD and Autism.

thing is, that is a hard one to judge.

Of course you get autistic adults that never manage to be more than they are, but there are also a lot who through careful guidance, training, work, therapy and simply maturing/brain maturation, manage to get to a point of not being that bad and able to live a life of sorts/hold a job/contribute.

Knowing which is which isn't possible when they're babies/young children.

It's quite difficult not to draw inferences from the fact that a thread about ableism against children on a parenting site has morphed into one about assisted dying.

I am in favour of the principle of assisted dying fwiw, but outside of an ideal world in which everyone's motivations are moral and pure and good, a 'good death' for those suffering turns out to be the thin end of a very uncomfortable wedge. Euthanasia already accounts for 1 in 20 deaths in Canada and I find that chilling.

Society is becoming less compassionate as we run out of cash to have nice things. Healthcare costs for the elderly are already being eyed up as 'savings' if AD becomes ubiquitous and it won't be long before the costs associated with disabled children are viewed in the same light.

This isn’t “assisted dying.” Assisted dying requires the individual’s informed consent, and a newborn simply cannot provide that. What’s being proposed is effectively eugenics: the killing of those deemed undesirable.
I’ve reported multiple posts, yet Mumsnet has left them up. That, in itself, says a great deal about the platform and its willingness to host such abhorrent views.

@FoughtIt I don't think the DSM contains a diagnosis called "general violent autism".

There are certainly comorbidities of autism that may contribute to or exacerbate violent behaviour, but it would be absolutely wrong to conflate autistic people with violence.

Well, quite. AD should require those things, but I would bet my boots that in time, it won't (once we've all got over the squeamishness of having it on the statute books). We will end up with something that looks more like eugenics and in which a total lack of compassion for the disabled is a state-endorsed view.