RFK’s Stance on Autism Evokes Nazi Germany Eugenics

Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, is known for his controversial opinions about public health that are not supported by evidence. He describes autistic people as “a burden on their family,” and believes that vaccines contribute to autism, despite that commonly referenced myth being proven untrue.

What is Autism?

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition with strong hereditary elements, but environmental factors may contribute to autism susceptibility. Researchers have found that mothers who are exposed to significant amounts of environmental risks and infants exposed in early life may increase the risk of autism, however, the environment is not the only contribution.

Recently, RFK has stated that autistic people 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 on a date, many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”

His statements are false, autistic people can and have done all those things and they can be productive members of society given the appropriate resources and support, they are not “useless eaters.” RFK has caused understandable outrage among people with autism and other disabilities, their parents, health care workers, and historians alike.

Instead of discussing ways to appropriately support disabled citizens, American politicians are discussing ways to segregate, study, and eradicate disabilities. RFK wants to “cure” people with autism, however autism is not a disease, it is a neuro-developmental disability which is partly hereditary, and the only way to “eliminate “cure” autism is to sterilize or kill the people with autism.

RFK’s proposed plan is to create a registry of medical data on autistic individuals, and to conduct extensive studies to determine environmental causes of autism so they can eradicate the disability. Earlier this year, he began promoting his controversial idea to create “wellness farms” to send people who take prescription or illicit drugs to “rehabilitate” them.

There are Significant Risks

Creating registries with personal information and medical history is unethical because it violates an individual’s right to privacy and poses security risks.

There is a risk that the data will be used for purposes beyond the stated goals without consent or ethical review. Americans are losing faith in the transparency and accountability of governmental agencies due to the recent changes with the Trump administration, particularly with DOGE.

Not only that, but creating this registry poses significant risks for medical profiling, surveillance, discrimination in education or employment, and further stigmatization.

RFK’s rhetoric is dehumanizing, and he perpetuates harmful stereotypes about autistic people. While he states that his plan is for the benefit of public health, it is eugenics.

What is Eugenics?

Eugenics is the study of manipulating human reproduction to increase desirable heritable characteristics and to decrease or eradicate undesirable characteristics. Eugenics means “good genes,” and it was developed in the late 1800s by Sir Francis Galton as an unscientific and racist system to improve the human race. Eugenicists in Europe and North America promoted the idea even though it was increasingly discredited. One main method to prevent undesirable traits is to enforce abortions or sterilizations on people who had the traits or disabilities, and sterilization increased throughout the 1920s and 30s.

Eugenics became associated with Nazi Germany due to their racist and ableist policies of segregation and extermination. Citizens who were deemed unfit for society or incurably sick were systematically killed in the Aktion T4 campaign. Upwards of 300,000 disabled adults were killed in psychiatric hospitals in Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945.

Also, an estimated 400,000 people were coerced into sterilization. Either the patient or their caregiver would sign an agreement to undergo a dangerous and unsanitary sterilization (often experimental). An unknown number of patients were forcibly sterilized without consent. Children, including hundreds of Afro-German children of the Rhineland, were also sterilized with or without consent.

Asperger and His Dark Legacy

RFK’s discriminatory rhetoric against autistic people and the need to eradicate the “disease” is repeating Nazi rhetoric propelled by Dr. Hans Asperger. Asperger was an Austrian physician who studied neurodivergence, particularly in children, and he is the namesake for the outdated term “Asperger’s Syndrome.” That terminology has not been an official diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders since 2013. It is just “autism spectrum disorder” now.

The truth is, Asperger was a Nazi who called autistic people “autistic psychopaths” and said they were just “useless eaters” and “unworthy of life.” He created a biased and questionable diagnostic criteria for autism, and he facilitated the murder of hundreds of children at the children’s hospital he oversaw in Vienna.

Between 5,000 and 10,000 disabled children were killed in total in Nazi Germany because of their physical or mental disabilities as a part of the euthanasia program.

Nazis promoted the idea that disabled people were unfit for society so parents and caregivers sent disabled children to the hospitals where they were diagnosed and “treated,” and if they could not be “rehabilitated” or conditioned to fit into society, they were euthanized.

Edith Sheffer’s book Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna offers a crucial and unsettling re-evaluation of Hans Asperger’s legacy.

The genocide of disabled adults and children in Nazi Germany should serve as a warning, not a blueprint.