Emery Eversoll and her mother shared a good laugh when Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that some autistic children will never write poems.
The 16-year-old's bedroom is full of notebooks featuring her prose. Sometimes, she quietly recites poetry to get through an outburst of anger. Her mother began suspecting she may have autism, in part, because she had memorized every word from a favorite book by age 2.
Still, this Kansas family is optimistic about Kennedy's plans to launch a broad-based study of what causes autism , the complex developmental disorder that impacts the brain and causes delays in language or learning, social withdrawal and an unusual need for routine. Kennedy has vowed to identify some of the causes of autism, which has been studied for decades, by September.
Kennedy has said autism "destroys families." He said children with autism "will never pay taxes, they'll never hold a job, they'll never play baseball, they'll never write a poem, they'll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted."
His comments and his plan to swiftly study its causes, have splintered a community of millions of people living with autism. For some, they were an overdue recognition of the day-to-day difficulties for families with autistic loved ones. To others, Kennedy deeply misrepresented the realities of their disability, provoking concern about his ability to handle a sweeping assessment of the disorder.