Considered at the societal level, the question is: If we were able, would we move to eliminate large segments of the population and the different ways of experiencing the world that characterize them? Doing so would arise from a judgment that the lives of people with neurological differences are less worthy than the rest of ours — as is already clearly the judgment so many parents are making with respect to Down syndrome pregnancies.

The cases of people with autism, dyslexia, ADHD, and depression who are able to lead successful, productive and well-adapted lives speak powerfully. Advocates with autism and other neurological differences say that they would never eliminate their singular traits — that those are much of what gives them their identity. Temple Grandin, Blake E. S. Taylor, Beethoven, and innumerable others show the kind of contributions such individuals are able to make to society. They show us how wrong we would have been were we to have tried to change them to be other than they are, or worse, never given these individuals a chance at life.

The heart of the matter of neurodiversity is not the hypothetical question of how we might use genetic testing in the future, but the very immediate question of how we are to regard and treat those who are already here. And important though the high-functioning individuals are as examples, the worth of a life should not have to be justified by extraordinary achievements. One of the lessons of H. G. Wells’s story [“The Country of the Blind”] is that the narrowness of our vision easily obscures the value of the lives of others, especially when they seem to us impaired.

Every life has joy and triumph, pain and hardship, aspiration and frustration — all parceled out unequally, and this only in part because of the different biological hands we are dealt. In labeling certain individuals “defective” or “disordered,” we act in part to wall off some people as the unfortunate, tacitly claiming that the rest of us are whole, avoiding the truth that we are all flawed, struggling with deficiencies, working with and against aspects of ourselves we would like to overcome. In labeling others as “disabled,” we must ask whether we are motivated by sympathy and compassion, or by fear and the difficulty of knowing the minds of others.