Comment by Seb-C

It is well understood already that the number of autistic people is not actually increasing. What is increasing is our understanding of it and the number of diagnostics.

The fact that high functioning people like Asperger got merged with it and changed to a spectrum is precisely science at work, achieving to improve our understanding of the phenomenon. We previously believed that only the extreme cases were autistic, but we now understand that this limit was arbitrary and wrong, because autism is a broader spectrum of people with a wide range of possible characteristics.

Autism is not a disease, it's a neurodivergence, and it is very important to understand that autistic people are not broken, but simply function differently. The proof being that outside of a minority of extreme cases, autistic people does not have issues communicating or socializing with other autistic people.

Trying to categorize people as "normal" and "abnormal" and then pretending to "fix" the abnormal ones is dangerous and drifts towards eugenism, because there is not a single definition of normal, and there is probably not a single person on earth that is "normal".

If 97% of the population was autistic, then autistic people would not have any issues. The remaining 3% of what is currently considered neurotypical would be the ones having difficulties socializing, communicating and experiencing severe anxieties and psychological problems due to it.

This is why the solution is not to "fix" autism, but to help them find an environment where they can strive, be understood and live comfortably.