In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the congressional role in the issue.
Jerry Carino at The Asbury Park Press:
In the mid-1990s, Brick Township residents Bobbie and Billy Gallagher were desperate to find help for their two young children with autism.
“I had started attending a parents’ support group, and it seemed like there were a lot of parents sitting around the table whose children had been newly diagnosed,” Bobbie Gallagher recalled. “So I sent out a survey to parents in the town asking if anybody had a child with autism, because it seemed like there were so many of them.”
Sending out a survey was a lot harder back then, at the dawn of the electronic age.
“We got zero help from the school district with that survey,” Billy Gallagher said. “Although the school district sent home who to vote for in the school-board elections – that made it into kids’ backpacks – our survey would not. But we found the bus drivers and the aides on the buses helpful in distributing it.”
Between that, the bulletin board in the Brick branch of the Ocean County Library, and a small ad in a weekly newspaper, the Gallaghers got enough surveys out to produce eye-opening feedback – 45 Brick residents answered in the affirmative.
New Jersey’s department of health declined to act on the survey, but it got the attention of the Gallaghers’ congressman, Republican Chris Smith, who met with them in September of 1997.
“He said the information we gathered was important and he would take this to the next level,” Bobbie Gallagher said.
In 2000, aided by a public push from NFL quarterbacks Dan Marino and Doug Flutie – both of whom have children with autism – Smith’s bill for autism research became codified in federal law. Those provisions have expanded over a quarter-century, and last month what has become known as the Autism CARES Act was reauthorized by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden. The law funds $1.95 billion over five years for autism research and intervention programs at the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control, and the Health Resources and Services Administration.
