There’s a big distinction between the early intervention being spoken about by institutions, which is ABA, and intervening when an autistic child needs help with something. ABA is a blanket therapy that draws its origins from and is strikingly similar to gay conversion therapy. The idea being that they can therapize kids early on to not be autistic, basically taking an innate quality and trying to socialize it out of them through reward/punishment. Especially with the definition of autism being so broad at this point, it’s very easy to connect that to trying to change deviant behavior.
On the other hand, I agree - there could be awesome support services for the myriad of different ways autism manifests and providing help for specific problems as needed - especially changes in an autistic child’s environment according to their various sensory needs. In this instance though, “early intervention” is predicated on the idea that autism is a disease and needs to be cured.
It’s also used, cynically by RFK Jr. & his ilk, to track autism everywhere and eventually find a “cause”, therefore a cure.
This also has roots in the idea that a lot of people believe there is a genetic predisposition to autism, and therefore that there could be prenatal test to decide whether the baby would be autistic, with a high percentage of the population then deciding they would abort their baby.
Yeah well those same group chats took down Silicon Valley Bank 😂