Here's the good news and the bad news; autism has become a "hot issue" in the presidential campaign. Bad news because our ranks have grown to a full 1% of the American population and counting. Good news because the crisis this epidemic poses to our society at large is, at...

Seven weeks ago I moved into a beach cottage in Venice. In the morning the air smells of sea and jasmine. I awaken to birdsongs. Sometimes they are not songs, but caws. Sometimes the caws are outright shrieks. With the sea come the gulls. With the infinite majesty of the...

What is it every pregnant mother fears? That her child will not be born, that her child will be born dead, that her child will be born unwell, unable to live a whole and healthy life. The day my son arrived I counted his toes and fingers and gazed into...

How did it happen that the only people in America who openly claim Faith Based Initiatives are Conservatives? How did they get to lay claim to Jesus’ intentions when His mysterious, koan-like parables have perplexed theologians for centuries? What commeds their moral assertions when Christ’s resounding message is to care...

Last night I did something highly unusual for a parent of a child with Autism...I left the house before my son was asleep. I went out to dinner with the parent of another Autistic boy. We swapped war stories...his son ran out of the car in the middle of Wilshire...

If anyone can cause me to pause in my Pro-Choice ferver and consider the opposing point of view, it's my dear friend, Patty Heaton. And not just because of the martinis that usually lubricate our monthly lunchtime downloads. But because we share an inner passion; motherhood. We both carried...

Eleven years ago, almost to the month, my son Matthew received his first set of childhood inoculations. At the time, my husband had protested. Vaccinations made him nervous, he wasn’t sure we should proceed, he had heard rumors. Friends of friends had said something about immunizations being linked to neurological...