Apparently Judith Warner has an Op-Ed piece in today's Times on vaccines and autism. It's entirely behind the firewall, as in they don't even give you the first sentence. Check out Wampum if you're curious re the details.

[Slight digression] I saw some interesting footage of the spousal unit's cousin, who is about my age and has been dx as an adult w/Asperger's. At present she's noticeably impaired: she rarely speaks and often stares off into space unless prodded to do something. My impression when I first met her was that she was mentally retarded; she was also dressed rather childishly for a woman her age.

Anyway, so they had these family films of her from her babyhood on, and it's heartbreaking. She looks pretty damn normal to me in the footage I've seen about up through age five or so: she is waving to the camera, smiling appropriately, looking around, following her mother's gaze, playing Ring Around the Rosie, racing her little sister and kissing her. In fact, for the first fifteen to twenty minutes I kept arguing that it was in fact she, not her (neurotypical) younger sister in the footage we were watching, because the child in the video looked so typical in her behavior. We're not close to this relative and I'd always heard sketchy things about what she'd been like ("always difficult"); then it turns out there were alternate theories of What Went Wrong (after her grandfather died she withdrew, e.g., or some other kind of pop psych traumatic explanation). And no one knew about Asperger's 30-some years ago. But something clearly changed: the grown woman I saw was infinitely less interactive and social than the child I'd seen in the videos.

She sent my husband a card a few years ago, writing that she thought she remembered his birthday. There are all those cliches about a frightened person hidden inside: books like Dibs, in Search of Self. But she sends the card, and I see the footage, and it's hard for me not to think that the person she seemed to be in that video is somehow still hidden in there. Which is sentimental, and certainly doesn't fit my perception of my Primera, which is that she has been very much herself since the second she drew breath, and the, ahem, behavioral rigidity or strength of personality have always been a big part of her.