to improve public awareness, medical knowledge, educational programming and
remedial therapies and to make them available to as many newly diagnosed children as
possible. Other consequences will evolve throughout this century, as this larger
generation of individuals identified as “autistic,” with greatly varying abilities and needs,
emerge as mature members of their communities. Both the decline of institutionalization
during the last part of the twentieth century and the success of new treatments will likely
promote higher expectations among this cohort of people. An unprecedented number of
people with autism, who hope to enjoy an average life expectancy and to live
independently, will struggle to assure their right to a decent quality of life.
Currently, the rights of people with disabilities such as autism are sustained by
anti-discrimination principles and uncertain commitments to social inclusion. Under
present conditions, neither provides an adequate basis for the large-scale provision of
services and educational opportunities for people with autism. Many typical citizens
resist inclusion of people with autism and avoid exposure to uncomfortable interactions
with people who they perceive as anti-social, gender inappropriate, or simply odd. More
serious threats to inclusion result from the failure to support the high costs of remediation
programs and the perceived threat of autistic people as dangerous.
This situation calls for a new look at how democratic societies imagine disabled
people as citizens and how their inclusion is contingent on the normalization of
differences. These issues can be generalized beyond autism to other marginalized social
identities. But in the case of autism, a strong defense of democratic pluralism is necessary
to counteract the common perception that these people are somehow unique in their
incorporatibility into communities. This misperception is based on a social construction
of autism that universalizes the condition and characterizes autistic people as incapable of
3
Convention