Sienna (@sienna.stims) • Threads, Say more

"If you're not willing to have a disabled child, don't have any children."

This is a valid argument to make, and it does have very solid reasoning. If a parent chooses to end a pregnancy because medical systems, social supports etc. are inadequate… you can’t ensure that any a future child will not come up against the same barriers.

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sienna.stims

The vast majority of parents — you’d hope — go into parenthood knowing that something unforeseen can occur. An unknown genetic disorder, birth complications, accidents or illnesses that can cause disability at any age.

But there is a difference between accepting risk, and accepting a known outcome.

sienna.stims

A definitive, prenatal diagnosis presents a concrete reality. Parents, at that stage, aren’t accepting risk. The reality is laid out in front of them (hopefully, reliably), and they make their decision based on that information.

sienna.stims

And some of the information such as regarding the inadequacies of health and social systems is only made known once disability is experienced. A parent going through a pregnancy with a “healthy” baby is not necessarily looking into it, meaning they are often completely unaware of how broken those support systems are until they suddenly have to rely on them.

sienna.stims

By labelling people as “eugenicists” or saying they “did eugenics”, we immeaditely frame them — and their decisions — as evil. It’s easy to then assume an attitude of, “Well, they’re bad. No reasonable person would make that choice” — and that doesn’t just shut down empathy, it shuts down analysis. It prevents us from looking at the real reasons someone made a decision, and in turn, advocating for better supports.

sienna.stims

As someone with a severe, life-limiting disorder with a monogenetic cause, it is deeply exhausting and painful to watch this debate unfold. I have always had a front-row seat to how we talk about genetic disorders and reproductive freedom, and it’s clear to me that people do not understand where the line between personal choice and eugenics actually.

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Because people are lacking historical context, they look to modern, prenatal screening and label it as eugenics. And while there are legitimate concerns as to how genetic counselling is conducted, and how environmental pressures shape decisions, it’s important to remember that true eugenics was never an individual choice. It was a tool of state control.

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When Francis Galton coined the term and laid out his vision, he explicitly wrote that for eugenics to work, it “must be introduced into our national policy, as an administration whose action in many ways is obligatory and exercised with full control of the state.” By it’s own definition, eugenics relies on state‑driven “social control” and obligations that strip away individual freedom.

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When an individual family sits in a doctor’s office and makes an agonising decision about a genetic diagnosis, they are not acting as agents of the state engineering a perfect population. They are exercising their own reproductive autonomy based on their personal capacity, empathy and resources.

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sienna.stims

Self-diagnosis of autism (when properly researched) is fine.

Self-diagnosing yourself as "high support needs" or "Level 3" autistic when you haven't even had a professional assessment is not.

Level 3 autism isn't an identity. It's a clinical classification. When support-needs language becomes detached from its clinical meaning, people with genuinely high support needs are spoken over.

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And I do find it particularly concerning when someone doing this gains so much traction. If someone can claim "high support needs" while describing a level of independence that simply does not meet the criteria, and thousands of people accept it uncritically, it suggests people no longer understand what high support needs actually means.

And when that happens, the realities faced by people who genuinely require very substantial support become increasingly invisible.

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