When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said autistic children “will never play baseball” and suggested they are a burden, he touched off more than a debate.
He touched a wound. In Belfast, Maine, Anaïs Godard answered with an open letter that is short, sharp, and impossible to ignore. It’s not a policy paper. It’s a mother introducing the world to her daughter.
Godard’s girl is five. She does not speak in sentences yet, but she knows how to answer a joke with a smirk.
She organizes her markers by color, then chaos, then color again. She plays baseball without rules, which Godard says is probably the right way to play it.
When another child is upset, before the adults notice, before the child even cries, she takes their hand and leans her forehead against theirs, gently, like she’s checking for a fever only she can feel.
Those lines aren’t pity. They are a portrait. Godard writes, “She is herself, entirely. That is not a flaw. It’s a form of resistance.”
That sentence flips the script. The point of the letter is simple: autistic children are not collateral damage for someone’s political point.
They are people with their own ways of seeing and being, and those ways deserve respect.
Read More: Freshman Football Coach John Getgey from Cincinnati, Ohio’s St. Xavier High School, Passes Away!
Anaïs Godard pens a heartfelt open letter defending her daughter and all autistic children
Godard fires back at the lazy assumptions behind public rhetoric. She rejects the idea that contributions must look a certain way.
“Neurodivergent minds imagined the future,” she writes, and then lists the evidence, people whose different perceptions gave the world Alice in Wonderland, airplanes, computers, noise-cancelling headphones, and more.
She names Temple Grandin, Alan Turing, and Dr. Amar Bose. The point is not to make her daughter a trophy but to show that the value of human life isn’t measured only by productivity or convention.
Reaction to the letter has been immediate. Writer John Foster posted “BRAVO!” and noted that the piece ranked among the most read on a prominent platform, a sign that the message landed.
Connie Appleby urged people who know autistic children or adults to read it, calling the letter a necessary counter to the kind of dismissive language that turns living people into talking points. She wrote,
For those if you who know an autistic child or adult,I hope you read this. This letter was written to RFK Jr from a mom of an autistic child in response to his comment about autistic children “will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball.”
Godard’s argument is also a practical rebuke. She writes that when pundits reduce autistic people to burdens, what really damages families is ignorance, isolation, and shame dressed up as concern.
That’s where policy and public conversation need to change. Families need support, schools need training, and communities need compassion. And the conversation needs to stop treating whole people as hypothetical problems.
The moral of the letter is actually low-tech and human. Godard asks readers to look at her daughter the way a parent would: as someone to marvel at, to protect, to celebrate.
“She won’t make your podium more sympathetic or your policies more tragic,” Godard says. “She’s not yours to pity. She’s mine to marvel at.”
That line is a corrective: if we want public debate about care and services, fine. But don’t bring children into it like they are props.
There’s a hard lesson in the list of names Godard invokes. Creativity and discovery have often come from minds that don’t fit the narrow norm.
That does not mean every autistic person will change the world. It means we stop using a few exceptional stories to grade the worth of everyone else. Worth is intrinsic. Contribution is varied. Dignity is nonnegotiable.
The letter also works as a practical nudge. Godard doesn’t demand miracles. She asks for the basic things adults can give: fewer assumptions, more listening, policies that don’t treat disability as a headline.
She shows the human cost of careless words and the human lift that comes from community when it listens instead of shaming.
Read the letter if you know an autistic child. Read it if you don’t. Godard’s piece is short, personal, and precise.
It’s meant to do one thing well: make you see a child as a child, not a statistic.
And if you still need proof that the things the world needs can come from unexpected places, look around the room, the airplane, the poem, the miracle medical fix, the quiet person who notices another child’s fever first.
Public argument about disability policy matters. But it’s not separate from private lives. When public figures choose words carelessly, the consequences land in homes.
Godard’s letter is not just a response to a campaign line. It’s a reminder that every child’s life is already full of value, and that the decent thing is to stop shrinking them down to fit someone else’s narrative.
