What Happens After ABA Abolition?: Why the Question Everyone Avoids Is the Only One That Matters

Bridgette Hamstead

Table of Contents

Author’s Note

Introduction
What Happens After Abolition: Why the Question Everyone Avoids Is the Only One That Matters

ABA as a State Sanctioned Harm Industry
How Coercion Became Policy, and Why That Matters

Why Reform Is Ethically Insufficient
When Changing the Language Leaves the Violence Intact

Abolition as a Public Health Intervention
Why Ending ABA Is About Population Level Harm Reduction, Not Ideological Purity

What Happens to Providers When a Harm Industry Ends
Accountability, Loss of Power, and the Limits of Professional Entitlement

Why Retraining Is Not Redemption
Accountability Cannot Be Achieved Through Vocabulary Shifts

Corporate Accountability and Restitution
When Harm Is Profitable, Individual Ethics Are Not Enough

Academic Power and Epistemic Repair
What It Means to Discredit a Paradigm, Not Just a Practice

The Myth of the Care Vacuum
What Actually Emerges When Coercive Systems Lose Their Monopoly

Short Term Chaos and Long Term Repair
Why Disruption Is Not Evidence of Failure

What Justice Requires
Ending the Right to Harm and Refusing to Rebuild It Softly

Reflection Questions
For Autistic Readers
For Parents and Caregivers
For Educators and School Leaders
For Clinicians and Service Providers
For Researchers and Academics
For Policymakers and Funders
For Institutions and Organizational Leaders
For Allies and the General Public
For People Inside the ABA Ecosystem

Closing
After the Question Is Finally Answered

Author’s Note

I am writing this as an autistic adult who came to this analysis not through ideology, but through accumulation. Accumulation of stories from autistic people across ages, races, genders, and support needs. Accumulation of research that refuses to stay quiet. Accumulation of harm that keeps repeating itself no matter how many times the language softens. This article is not a thought experiment. It is the product of years of listening to autistic people describe what was done to them in the name of help, and of watching institutions respond not with accountability, but with defensiveness and rebranding.

I want to be clear about what this piece is and is not. It is not a claim that autistic people do not need support. We do. It is not a claim that families are malicious for seeking services in a system that gave them no meaningful alternatives. They are not. It is not a claim that every individual who worked in ABA is identical in intent or disposition. Human beings are more complex than that. What this article does claim is that intent does not negate impact, and that systems built on coercion do not become ethical simply because they are familiar, profitable, or professionally entrenched.

I am also not interested in performative balance. Autistic people have been required to perform reasonableness, gratitude, and moderation for decades in order to be heard at all. Even then, we were rarely believed. Meanwhile, a multibillion dollar industry built on our compliance has been granted endless benefit of the doubt. This article does not split the difference between harm and comfort. It centers safety, autonomy, and evidence, because those are the ethical baselines that were denied to us.

Some readers will find this piece confronting. That discomfort is not accidental. It reflects the tension that arises when a system is examined from the perspective of those it harmed rather than those it empowered. If you feel defensive while reading, I invite you to ask what is being threatened. If it is a livelihood, a professional identity, or a long held belief about helping, that threat is real. But it is not equivalent to the threat autistic people have lived with when our bodies, communication, and survival strategies were treated as problems to be solved.

Finally, I want to name that abolition is not a single event. It is a process. It is uneven, contested, and imperfect. It does not promise purity. It promises a refusal to continue what we now know causes harm. Writing this is part of that refusal. It is also an act of faith that autistic people deserve systems built around our humanity rather than our erasure.

If you are an autistic reader, especially one who survived ABA or similar compliance based interventions, I want you to know that nothing in this article requires your forgiveness, your understanding, or your patience. Your survival is already evidence enough. If you are a family member, educator, or professional trying to make sense of this reckoning, I hope this piece offers clarity, even if it also brings grief. And if you are someone with institutional power, I hope you read this not as an attack, but as an invitation to finally take responsibility for what has been normalized for far too long.

This work exists because autistic people kept telling the truth even when it was inconvenient. I am committed to continuing to listen.

What Happens After ABA Abolition?

Why the Question Everyone Avoids Is the Only One That Matters

The idea of banning Applied Behavior Analysis in the United States is usually treated as unthinkable. When it is raised, it is framed as extremist, irresponsible, or disconnected from reality. The conversation rarely advances beyond shock. What about the children. What about families. What about services. What about the professionals. These questions arrive quickly, urgently, and almost always in that order. What is missing from them is equally telling. What about the autistic people who were harmed. What about the evidence. What about the moral legitimacy of a system built on coercion.

This article begins from a different premise. Not whether banning ABA would be disruptive, but whether continuing to sanction it is ethical given what we now know. Not whether the system could survive abolition, but whether autistic people should be required to survive the system any longer.

For decades, ABA has been positioned as the default response to autism in the United States. It is mandated by insurance. Embedded in early intervention programs. Elevated by universities. Defended by professional organizations. Families are told it is the only evidence based option, and refusal is framed as negligence. Within this context, it becomes nearly impossible to ask the most basic ethical question: what if the problem is not how ABA is practiced, but that it exists at all.

That question is not rhetorical. It is grounded in a growing body of empirical evidence, survivor testimony, and ethical analysis that converge on the same conclusion. ABA is not a neutral support that occasionally causes harm. It is a system designed to suppress autistic difference in order to produce behavioral conformity. The harm it produces is not accidental. It is structural.

Autistic adults have been describing ABA as traumatic for years. They have named the anxiety, dissociation, loss of self trust, and vulnerability to abuse that followed compliance based conditioning. These accounts were dismissed as anecdotal or emotionally driven until researchers began documenting the same outcomes through standardized measures. Elevated rates of post traumatic stress symptoms. Increased suicidality. Long term mental health consequences tied not to autism itself, but to how autistic people were treated. The gap between lived experience and research has narrowed to the point where denial is no longer credible.

And yet, the conversation remains stalled. Rather than grappling with the ethical implications of this evidence, institutions default to reform narratives. We are told that ABA has evolved. That it can be made gentle. That the answer is better training, not abolition. What these narratives avoid is the underlying question of power. Who decides what autistic people must become in order to be accepted. Who benefits from that decision. And who pays the cost when compliance is treated as care.

Abolition is often misunderstood as destruction. In reality, it is a method of harm prevention. It is what societies turn to when a practice is found to be incompatible with human rights, even if it was once normalized. Corporal punishment. Conversion therapy. Institutionalization. In each case, reform delayed abolition by offering softer versions of the same violence. In each case, justice required a line to be drawn.

The question this article asks is not whether banning ABA would be easy. It would not be. The question is whether continuing to sanction it is defensible. What would actually happen if ABA were banned. What would happen to providers, institutions, and families. What kinds of supports would grow in its absence. And what would justice require if we took autistic lives seriously as lives worth protecting rather than correcting.

The sections that follow do not offer a fantasy of seamless transition. They offer a sober analysis of disruption, accountability, and repair. They name the losses that would occur, and they argue that some of those losses are not only acceptable, but necessary. They also name what becomes possible when a system built on control loses its monopoly.

This is not a call for purity or punishment. It is a call for honesty. About what ABA is. About what it does. And about what it would mean to finally stop asking autistic people to bear the cost of a system that was never built for their flourishing.

ABA as a State Sanctioned Harm Industry

How Coercion Became Policy, and Why That Matters

Applied Behavior Analysis did not become dominant because it was uniquely effective or because autistic people demanded it. It became dominant because it aligned cleanly with institutional priorities that valued control, standardization, and measurable compliance over human autonomy. To understand why banning ABA is not an overreaction but a delayed ethical correction, it is necessary to examine how the field was elevated from a fringe behavioral experiment into a state sanctioned industry.

From its inception, ABA was ideologically aligned with a worldview that treated autistic people not as subjects with inner lives, but as collections of observable outputs. Behaviorism’s rejection of internal experience was not neutral. It created a framework in which pain, consent, meaning, and selfhood were irrelevant unless they produced observable change. When this framework was applied to autistic children, it produced an intervention model that framed autistic traits as errors to be corrected rather than differences to be understood.

This is not an interpretive stretch. The foundational literature of ABA in autism explicitly described autistic people as lacking personhood and positioned behavioral control as the mechanism by which humanity could be imposed. Those ideas were never fully repudiated. They were softened linguistically, but they remained structurally intact. The core assumptions persisted: that autistic behavior is inherently suspect, that normalization is a legitimate goal, and that external agents are qualified to decide which expressions of self are acceptable.

What transformed ABA from a controversial theory into a national standard was not new ethical insight or superior outcomes. It was policy. Beginning in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries, states increasingly mandated insurance coverage for ABA while excluding or marginalizing other forms of support. Medicaid waivers, early intervention programs, and special education systems were rewritten to treat ABA as synonymous with autism treatment. This was not the result of democratic consensus among autistic people. It was the result of lobbying, professional self interest, and a cultural discomfort with disability that favored visible compliance over genuine inclusion.

Once insurance mandates were in place, ABA became self reinforcing. Providers multiplied. Certification boards gained power. University programs expanded. Families were told that refusing ABA was tantamount to neglect. Clinicians who questioned the model found themselves sidelined. Autistic voices were dismissed as biased, ungrateful, or too impaired to understand what was good for them. The industry did not simply grow. It entrenched itself.

The moral significance of state sanctioning cannot be overstated. When a government mandates funding for a practice, it signals that the practice is not merely acceptable, but necessary. It shapes parental decisions, professional training, and public perception. In the case of ABA, this meant that coercive control over autistic children became normalized as care. The fact that harm was occurring did not register as disqualifying, because the harm aligned with existing narratives that framed autistic distress as pathology rather than protest.

Over time, evidence of harm accumulated. Autistic adults began describing ABA as traumatic in large numbers. Researchers documented elevated rates of PTSD symptoms among those exposed to intensive behavioral interventions. Scholars connected compliance training to long term difficulties with self trust, boundaries, and vulnerability to abuse. Yet the industry did not contract. It adapted rhetorically while expanding structurally. Harm was reframed as anecdotal. Critics were accused of misunderstanding science. The field’s legitimacy insulated it from accountability.

This is what makes ABA a state sanctioned harm industry rather than a well intentioned practice gone wrong. It persisted not because evidence supported it, but because institutions protected it. Its continuation required the systematic devaluation of autistic testimony and the elevation of professional authority over lived experience. That dynamic is not accidental. It is characteristic of harm industries that operate under the guise of care.

Recognizing ABA as a state sanctioned harm industry changes the ethical question entirely. The issue is no longer whether individual practitioners meant well or whether some children appeared to benefit in the short term. The issue is whether a society is willing to continue endorsing a system that produces predictable harm to a marginalized population while dismissing that population’s objections.

When framed this way, abolition is not radical. It is overdue.

Why Reform Is Ethically Insufficient

When Changing the Language Leaves the Violence Intact

Calls to reform ABA rather than abolish it often present themselves as reasonable and balanced. They appeal to moderation, pragmatism, and incremental change. In practice, reform functions as a moral shield that allows harm to continue while appearing responsive to criticism. To understand why reform is ethically insufficient, it is necessary to distinguish between surface level change and structural transformation, and to ask whose safety is being prioritized in the process.

Reform narratives focus almost exclusively on technique. They emphasize newer terminology, gentler presentation, and selective distancing from the most overtly punitive practices of early ABA. Physical punishment is disavowed. Discrete trial drills are softened into play based interactions. Extinction is renamed. Yet beneath these cosmetic changes, the core logic remains unchanged. Autistic behavior is still framed as a problem to be managed. Compliance is still treated as progress. Goals are still set by non autistic authorities. Consent remains absent or assumed rather than actively obtained.

This matters because ethics is not determined by tone. It is determined by power. A system that retains unilateral authority over another person’s body, communication, and self expression remains coercive regardless of how kindly it is delivered. Reform does not disrupt that authority. It simply makes it more palatable to those who benefit from it.

The argument for reform also relies heavily on the claim that modern ABA is fundamentally different from its origins. This claim collapses under scrutiny. While some practices have shifted, the foundational assumptions have not been repudiated. Autistic traits such as stimming, atypical eye contact, and unconventional communication continue to be targeted when they interfere with social acceptance. The justification is no longer overtly about making autistic people appear normal, but about preparing them for a world that will not accommodate them. This reframing shifts responsibility away from institutions and onto autistic bodies. The harm remains the same.

Reform advocates often invoke evidence based practice as a defense, but this too is misleading. Much of the evidence supporting ABA relies on outcome measures that prioritize observable behavior change over wellbeing, autonomy, or long term mental health. Success is defined as reduced autistic expression, not increased quality of life. When harm is defined out of existence by the metrics used to measure success, reform becomes impossible. The system is designed to validate itself.

There is also a temporal problem with reform. Autistic people have been raising ethical concerns about ABA for decades. These concerns have not emerged suddenly. They have been documented, ignored, and dismissed repeatedly. At this point, continuing to argue for gradual reform is not a neutral stance. It is a decision to tolerate ongoing harm while professionals debate best practices. Ethics does not allow indefinite delay when credible evidence of harm exists.

History provides a useful parallel. No amount of reform could make conversion therapy ethical, because its premise was that queerness was a disorder to be corrected. No amount of reform could make institutionalization humane, because its premise was that disabled people needed to be segregated and controlled. In each case, reform efforts delayed abolition by creating the illusion of progress while preserving the underlying injustice.

ABA occupies the same category. Its premise is that autistic difference requires intervention to become acceptable. As long as that premise stands, reform will always reproduce harm. Changing the language without changing the power structure does not reduce violence. It conceals it.

There is an additional ethical failure embedded in reform narratives, which is the expectation that autistic people should accept continued exposure to harm while professionals learn to do better. This treats autistic people as a testing ground for improved ethics rather than as rights bearing individuals entitled to immediate protection. No other marginalized group is asked to endure ongoing coercion in the name of professional development. Autism should not be the exception.

Reform also fails to address accountability. It allows practitioners and institutions to disavow past harms without reckoning with their impact. There is no requirement to acknowledge trauma, to make restitution, or to relinquish authority. The same people remain in power, now armed with new terminology. This is not repair. It is laundering.

Ethical change requires a break, not a tweak. It requires acknowledging that a system was built on a flawed and harmful foundation and that no amount of renovation can make it safe. Abolition is not the rejection of care. It is the rejection of a framework that defined care as control.

Abolition as a Public Health Intervention

Why Ending ABA Is About Population Level Harm Reduction, Not Ideological Purity

Framing the abolition of ABA as a public health intervention shifts the conversation out of the realm of opinion and into the domain of preventable harm. Public health does not ask whether a practice feels familiar or whether an industry has grown accustomed to its own authority. It asks whether exposure increases risk, whether that risk is unevenly distributed across marginalized populations, and whether removing the exposure reduces long term morbidity and mortality. By these standards, the continued use of ABA represents a failure of preventive ethics.

Autistic people experience dramatically elevated rates of anxiety disorders, depression, trauma related symptoms, and suicidality across the lifespan. Large population studies consistently show that autistic adults are several times more likely to die by suicide than non autistic peers, with particularly high risk among autistic women, autistic trans people, and autistic people who experienced high levels of early life invalidation. These disparities are not inherent to autism. They are strongly associated with chronic stress, masking demands, and repeated exposure to environments that punish autistic regulation strategies.

ABA intensifies each of these risk factors during critical developmental periods. By design, it teaches autistic children that their spontaneous ways of moving, communicating, and self regulating are unacceptable. It conditions safety, praise, and access to resources on behavioral compliance. Trauma research is clear that when safety is contingent on self suppression, the nervous system adapts by prioritizing survival over authenticity. This adaptation is associated with long term difficulties in emotional regulation, identity integration, and boundary recognition. These are not abstract concerns. They map directly onto the mental health profiles observed in autistic adults.

From a public health perspective, ABA functions as an early life stressor with cumulative effects. Even when no single session appears overtly abusive, the chronic nature of the intervention matters. Many autistic children receive dozens of hours per week of behavioral monitoring over multiple years. That level of surveillance and control would be recognized as psychologically harmful in any other population. Its normalization in autism services reflects not evidence of safety, but the devaluation of autistic subjectivity.

Abolition interrupts this exposure pathway. Removing ABA does not instantly resolve trauma already incurred, but it prevents new cohorts of autistic children from being subjected to the same conditioning. Public health interventions often operate on this timeline. Banning leaded gasoline did not immediately eliminate neurological harm, but it drastically reduced future exposure. Ending institutionalization did not erase disability related trauma, but it prevented its routine reproduction. The ethical measure is not immediate relief, but long term harm reduction.

Importantly, the public health benefits of abolition extend beyond autistic individuals to families and communities. Parents trained to implement ABA often report high levels of stress, guilt, and moral conflict, particularly when asked to ignore distress signals or enforce extinction protocols. Siblings are exposed to environments where compliance is prioritized over mutual accommodation. These dynamics shape family systems in ways that increase burnout and fracture relationships. Removing ABA reduces these secondary stressors and allows families to reorganize around support rather than enforcement.

There is also a population level economic argument that aligns with public health ethics. The long term costs of untreated trauma, including mental health services, crisis care, lost employment, and early mortality, far exceed the short term costs of transitioning away from ABA. Preventive interventions that reduce trauma exposure are consistently more cost effective than downstream crisis management. Framing ABA abolition as fiscally irresponsible ignores the substantial hidden costs of maintaining a system that produces harm.

Critics often argue that without ABA, some autistic children will engage in dangerous behaviors that place themselves or others at risk. This concern deserves serious attention, but it does not justify maintaining a harmful system. Research shows that behaviors framed as dangerous are frequently associated with unmet communication needs, sensory overload, pain, or environmental instability. Addressing these factors reduces risk more effectively than behavioral suppression. Public health approaches prioritize addressing root causes over managing symptoms, particularly when symptom management itself causes harm.

Abolition also aligns with public health principles of equity. ABA is disproportionately applied to autistic children who are poor, racialized, or reliant on public insurance. Families with access to private resources are more likely to opt out, choose alternative supports, or limit exposure. This creates a two tiered system in which marginalized autistic children are more heavily subjected to coercive intervention. Ending ABA reduces this inequity by removing a practice that has functioned as a default for those with the least power to refuse.

Seen through this lens, abolition is not an ideological statement about the purity of support models. It is a decision to remove a documented risk factor from a vulnerable population. It reflects the same logic used to regulate other practices once deemed acceptable but later recognized as harmful. The question is not whether ABA can be improved, but whether continued exposure is ethically defensible given what is now known.

Public health ethics do not require certainty of harm to act. They require credible evidence of risk and a viable path to prevention. Both exist here. Ending ABA is not a rejection of care. It is an act of harm reduction grounded in evidence, equity, and a commitment to future generations of autistic people.

What Happens to Providers When a Harm Industry Ends

Accountability, Loss of Power, and the Limits of Professional Entitlement

When the possibility of banning ABA is raised, the conversation almost immediately shifts away from autistic people and toward providers. What will happen to them. How will they earn a living. How will society absorb the disruption. This reflex is revealing. It exposes an unspoken assumption that the continuity of professional careers is an ethical priority equal to or greater than the safety of the population those professionals served. In every other domain where a practice is found to be harmful, that assumption is rejected. Autism should not be treated as the exception.

When a harm industry ends, the defining ethical question is not how to preserve it, but how to prevent its logic from reproducing itself elsewhere. The purpose of abolition is not to punish individuals, but to dismantle a system of power that produced predictable harm. That necessarily entails loss. Loss of status. Loss of authority. Loss of access to a vulnerable population. These losses are not collateral damage. They are the mechanism by which harm stops.

If ABA were banned, the profession itself would have to legally cease to exist. Licensure and certification would be revoked. Insurance billing codes would be eliminated. University pipelines feeding the workforce would be shut down. This matters because harm industries do not disappear through voluntary evolution. They persist through rebranding. Without formal dissolution, the same practices would continue under new names, marketed as progressive while retaining the same control structures.

For individual providers, outcomes would necessarily diverge. Some would leave the field entirely. This already happens when professions are regulated out of existence. Workers in discredited or banned practices do not receive a guarantee of lifelong relevance. They are expected to adapt, retrain, or change industries. That expectation is not cruelty. It is a recognition that no one has a moral right to continue work that depends on the subjugation of others.

Others might transition into roles that do not involve direct authority over autistic people. Research administration, data analysis unrelated to autism, policy support, logistics, or roles outside health and education altogether are ethically distinct from continued control over autistic bodies and development. These pathways allow individuals to earn a living without recreating the conditions that caused harm. What they do not allow is a return to power over the same population under a softer label.

What should not occur is automatic reintegration into rebranded autism services. Allowing former ABA providers to become “affirming coaches” or “neurodiversity informed practitioners” without loss of authority or status would place autistic people at continued risk. It would also communicate that harm carries no lasting consequence beyond a change in vocabulary. In safeguarding ethics, this is unacceptable. Past participation in systemic harm establishes a duty of restraint, not a claim to renewed trust.

The idea that providers are entitled to remain in autism services rests on a misunderstanding of professional ethics. Professions exist to serve the public, not to perpetuate themselves. When a field is found to cause harm, the public interest requires its contraction, not its preservation. This principle already governs medicine, law, and education. A surgeon who repeatedly engaged in unethical practice does not become a gentler surgeon. A teacher who violated students’ rights does not receive a rebrand and return to the classroom. Autism services should not be governed by a lower ethical standard.

There is also a moral asymmetry that must be named. Autistic people who were harmed by ABA are rarely offered restitution, apology, or acknowledgment. They are expected to absorb trauma silently while providers debate their future. Centering provider outcomes without centering survivor impact reproduces the same hierarchy that allowed harm to occur in the first place. Ethical transitions prioritize those who were harmed, not those who benefited.

This does not require assuming that every individual provider acted with malice. It requires recognizing that willingness to participate in a coercive system, particularly after evidence of harm became widely available, carries ethical weight. Good intentions do not negate impact. Nor do they entitle someone to continued proximity to vulnerable people.

When a harm industry ends, some people lose careers they built in good faith. That is tragic, but it is not unjust. Justice is not obligated to preserve livelihoods built on the suffering of others. It is obligated to ensure that suffering does not continue.

Why Retraining Is Not Redemption

Accountability Cannot Be Achieved Through Vocabulary Shifts

One of the most persistent and emotionally charged responses to the idea of banning ABA is the insistence that retraining can solve the ethical problem. This argument assumes that harm was primarily technical rather than moral, and that with sufficient education, reflection, and updated language, those who participated in coercive practices can be transformed into safe practitioners for the same population. From a neurodiversity justice perspective, this assumption misunderstands both the nature of the harm and the requirements of accountability.

Retraining addresses skills. Redemption requires reckoning.

The harm produced by ABA was not the result of outdated techniques alone. It was the result of a belief system that treated autistic people as objects to be shaped rather than as subjects with inherent authority over their own bodies, communication, and development. That belief system was not peripheral to the work. It was the work. To build a career within ABA required accepting, normalizing, and enacting the idea that autistic expressions could legitimately be suppressed in the name of progress. That acceptance is not undone by attending a workshop or adopting new terminology.

Ethical accountability begins with the recognition that some forms of harm permanently disqualify individuals from certain kinds of power. In medicine, clinicians who repeatedly violated patient autonomy do not regain authority simply by completing additional training. In education, teachers who engaged in coercive or abusive practices are not restored to classrooms after a language update. In child welfare, practitioners who enforced harmful policies are often permanently barred from frontline roles. These limits are not about moral purity. They are about risk management and survivor safety.

Autism services have historically been granted an exception to this logic. Professionals who enforced compliance, ignored distress, and dismissed autistic testimony are often repositioned as experts on healing that very population. This inversion would be unthinkable in other contexts. Survivors of institutional abuse are not asked to trust former enforcers because those enforcers have changed their minds. Autistic people should not be asked to do so either.

There is also a temporal dimension to accountability that retraining narratives ignore. Autistic people have been publicly critiquing ABA for decades. Survivor testimony has been consistent, detailed, and increasingly supported by empirical research. Continuing to participate after this information became widely available was not an act of ignorance. It was an ethical choice made within a system that rewarded silence and punished dissent. Retraining does not retroactively erase that choice.

Redemption narratives also tend to recentralize professionals rather than those who were harmed. The story becomes about the provider’s growth, discomfort, and transformation, with autistic people cast as beneficiaries of that growth. This framing is ethically backwards. Autistic people are not raw material for professional self improvement. They are not obligated to provide forgiveness, validation, or opportunities for redemption to those who harmed them. Any ethical transition must be structured around boundaries, not reconciliation.

This does not mean that people cannot change. It means that change does not entitle someone to restored authority over the same population. A former ABA practitioner may sincerely reject coercive practices and still be ethically barred from working directly with autistic people, particularly children and nonspeaking autistic people. Moral growth is not synonymous with professional reinstatement. Accountability often requires accepting permanent limits.

Retraining can have a place in ethical transitions, but only when it is paired with loss of power. Learning about neurodiversity, disability justice, and trauma does not confer the right to apply that knowledge in positions of authority over those previously harmed. In many cases, the most ethical outcome is for former practitioners to redirect their skills into roles that do not involve direct control over autistic lives. This is not exile. It is restraint.

The insistence that retraining must lead to reintegration reveals an underlying belief that professionals are entitled to remain in proximity to autistic people regardless of past harm. That belief mirrors the very entitlement that allowed ABA to flourish. Ending that entitlement is not punitive. It is protective.

Redemption is a private moral process. Accountability is a public ethical obligation. Confusing the two has cost autistic people decades of safety.

Corporate Accountability and Restitution

When Harm Is Profitable, Individual Ethics Are Not Enough

Any serious discussion of banning ABA must distinguish between individual practitioners and the corporate structures that built, scaled, and defended the industry. While individual providers enacted harm, it was corporate entities, certification bodies, and private equity backed networks that transformed that harm into a multibillion dollar system. Accountability at this level cannot be symbolic. It must be structural.

Over the past two decades, ABA has undergone rapid corporatization. Large provider networks expanded by exploiting insurance mandates and Medicaid waivers that guaranteed reimbursement for behavioral services while excluding alternatives. Growth was driven not by improved outcomes, but by volume. More hours. More clients. More data. The business model depended on hiring low paid technicians, billing at higher rates through credentialed supervisors, and standardizing interventions in ways that maximized throughput rather than wellbeing. Autistic children became revenue streams, and families became conduits for billing.

This matters because harm that is incentivized will not self correct. Corporate ABA entities did not merely inherit a flawed model. They actively defended it. They funded lobbying efforts to entrench behavioral mandates. They shaped public messaging that framed ABA as the only evidence based option. They dismissed autistic testimony as unscientific. They rebranded coercion as compassion while continuing to extract profit from compliance based care. These were not isolated mistakes. They were strategic choices.

If ABA were banned, these organizations should not be allowed to pivot seamlessly into adjacent autism markets. Allowing a corporate entity that profited from coercive control to rebrand itself as neurodiversity affirming would reproduce harm under a new banner. The logic of profit driven intervention would remain intact, now armed with justice language. History shows that this kind of laundering is common when industries face ethical reckoning. It must be actively prevented.

Corporate accountability requires dissolution, divestment, and restitution. Provider networks whose business models depended on ABA should be required to wind down operations rather than reconstitute themselves as new autism service brands. Certification boards that legitimized the field should be dismantled. Professional associations that functioned as trade groups rather than ethical bodies should lose authority over policy and practice.

Restitution is a necessary component of this process. Autistic people and families have absorbed the costs of ABA’s harms without compensation, while corporations accumulated profit. Ethical transition requires redirecting resources toward repair. This could include funding for autistic led services, trauma informed mental health care, AAC access, community infrastructure, and research led by autistic scholars. Restitution is not charity. It is recognition that wealth was generated through harm and must be redistributed accordingly.

There is precedent for this approach. Industries that caused widespread harm, from tobacco to environmental polluters, have been required to contribute to remediation funds once their impact became undeniable. The fact that ABA was framed as care rather than exploitation does not absolve it of responsibility. Harm does not become ethical because it was socially sanctioned.

Corporate accountability also serves a preventative function. It signals that future service models will be judged not only by their intentions or marketing, but by their impact and power dynamics. Without this signal, new harm industries will emerge to fill the vacuum left by ABA, replicating its structures while claiming to be different. Accountability at the corporate level is how cycles of reinvention are broken.

Importantly, dismantling corporate ABA does not mean abandoning families or autistic people who relied on those services. It means redirecting resources away from entities that profited from coercion and toward systems that support autonomy, access, and community. The transition would be disruptive, but disruption is not synonymous with neglect. It is the necessary consequence of withdrawing legitimacy from a harmful enterprise.

Ethical abolition cannot stop at the individual level. As long as corporations are allowed to retain wealth, influence, and proximity to autistic communities, the conditions that produced harm will persist. Justice requires not only ending a practice, but dismantling the structures that made it profitable.

Academic Power and Epistemic Repair

What It Means to Discredit a Paradigm, Not Just a Practice

Any abolition of ABA that does not address academia will fail. Universities are not neutral observers in this story. They are the primary engines through which ABA was legitimized, reproduced, and insulated from critique. Academic departments did not merely study behavior analysis. They conferred authority, produced credentialed experts, shaped research agendas, and trained generations of professionals to treat autistic people as sites of intervention rather than sources of knowledge. Ending ABA requires not only shutting down services, but dismantling the epistemic power that made those services appear inevitable.

Behavior analysis programs did not become dominant because they offered a more humane understanding of autism. They became dominant because they fit neatly within positivist research traditions that prioritize measurability over meaning and control over context. Academic institutions rewarded this alignment. ABA research produced clean data sets, publishable graphs, and outcomes that could be operationalized and monetized. In doing so, it crowded out research traditions that centered lived experience, participatory design, and qualitative insight. Autistic scholarship was marginalized as subjective, while behaviorist claims to objectivity went largely unchallenged.

This imbalance had material consequences. When universities designate one paradigm as scientifically authoritative, it shapes funding decisions, clinical guidelines, and public policy. ABA gained its grip on autism services not only through insurance mandates, but through academic endorsement that framed it as the gold standard. Once that designation was in place, dissenting voices were framed as anti science rather than as ethical critics. Autistic scholars who challenged the field were dismissed as biased or emotional. Their exclusion was not incidental. It was structurally produced.

Epistemic repair begins with acknowledging that this exclusion was not a failure of inclusion, but a feature of the system. Behavior analysis relies on a model of knowledge production that treats autistic people as objects of study rather than as epistemic agents. As long as that model remains intact, harm will reproduce itself regardless of surface level reforms.

If ABA were banned, academic programs dedicated to training behavior analysts would need to be sunset. This does not mean that universities would collapse or that scientific inquiry would cease. It means that a particular framework would lose its institutional authority. This has happened before. Eugenics once occupied respected academic departments. Race science was taught as legitimate scholarship. When these paradigms were discredited, they were not gently updated. They were dismantled. Their proponents did not retain authority over the populations they had harmed.

Sunsetting ABA programs would require more than renaming degrees or shifting course titles. It would require removing behavior analysis as a central lens through which autism is studied and taught. Faculty whose scholarship is built on defending or minimizing coercive practices should not be repositioned as leaders of neurodiversity affirming education. This is not censorship. It is a recognition that expertise built on dehumanization cannot be the foundation for ethical care.

At the same time, abolition creates space for new forms of scholarship to thrive. Disability studies, autistic led research, participatory methodologies, and interdisciplinary approaches that integrate neuroscience, sociology, ethics, and lived experience would gain legitimacy. Research priorities would shift from behavior reduction to quality of life, access, and systemic design. Autistic people would no longer be confined to the role of research subjects. They would be recognized as theorists, critics, and leaders in knowledge production.

This shift matters beyond the academy. What universities teach shapes how society understands autism. When academic authority moves away from control based models and toward justice based frameworks, policy follows. Funding follows. Practice follows. Epistemic repair is not an abstract concern. It is a prerequisite for durable change.

Ending ABA without addressing academic power would leave the door open for its return under a different name. The language might change. The branding might soften. But the underlying assumptions would persist. True abolition requires discrediting the paradigm itself, not merely discontinuing its most visible expressions.

Epistemic repair is uncomfortable because it requires institutions to admit error. It requires scholars to relinquish authority. It requires universities to confront the fact that harm was not an unintended side effect of progress, but something they helped produce. Without this reckoning, abolition remains incomplete.

The Myth of the Care Vacuum

What Actually Emerges When Coercive Systems Lose Their Monopoly

The claim that banning ABA would leave autistic people without care is one of the most persistent and emotionally manipulative arguments used to defend its continuation. It relies on a sleight of hand that equates one specific industry with care itself, as though the needs of autistic people only came into existence once behaviorism arrived. This framing collapses need into method and then treats the disappearance of the method as the disappearance of care. It is not an empirical claim. It is a political one.

ABA has functioned for decades as an artificial bottleneck. Through insurance mandates, Medicaid waivers, early intervention policies, and special education frameworks, behavioral intervention was positioned as the default and often the only reimbursable form of autism support. This did not occur because other supports were ineffective. It occurred because ABA aligned neatly with institutional priorities that favored standardization, surveillance, and measurable compliance. Over time, this alignment crowded out alternatives by starving them of funding, legitimacy, and infrastructure.

The result is a distorted ecosystem. Families are told that if they refuse ABA, they are refusing support altogether. Schools are told that without behavioral aides, autistic students cannot be educated. Clinicians are told that anything not behaviorally measurable is unscientific. This produces the illusion of a vacuum, when in reality what exists is a monopoly.

When monopolies collapse, what follows is not absence, but diversification.

One of the first areas to expand in a post ABA landscape would be communication access. Augmentative and alternative communication has one of the strongest evidence bases in autism support, associated with reductions in distress, increases in self advocacy, and improved participation across settings. Yet under ABA dominated systems, AAC is often delayed, restricted, or instrumentalized to produce compliance rather than agency. Communication is treated as a tool to manage behavior, not as a human right.

Without ABA, communication access would no longer be contingent on behavioral readiness or compliance goals. AAC would be introduced early, supported consistently, and centered on the autistic person’s priorities rather than caregiver convenience. Research consistently shows that AAC use does not impede speech development and often supports it. More importantly, it reduces the desperation that arises when people cannot reliably express pain, refusal, confusion, or need. Many behaviors labeled as dangerous or aggressive are strongly correlated with communication barriers. Addressing those barriers reduces risk more effectively than suppression ever did.

Alongside communication access, sensory informed and environmental support programs would grow rapidly. A substantial body of research demonstrates that autistic distress is often a predictable response to sensory overload, unpredictability, pain, or energy depletion. Occupational therapy approaches that focus on sensory regulation, environmental adaptation, and energy conservation are associated with improved wellbeing and reduced distress without requiring suppression of autistic traits. When these approaches are not subordinated to behavioral goals, they become preventative rather than reactive.

Instead of asking how to stop a behavior, the question shifts to why the behavior is occurring and what environmental changes would make it unnecessary. This reframing reduces crisis escalation and long term trauma exposure. It also aligns with the social model of disability by locating the problem in the environment rather than the person.

Community based and peer led programs would also move from the margins to the center. Autistic peer support has robust evidence for improving quality of life, reducing isolation, and increasing self trust, particularly among adolescents and adults. Peer led models operate on a fundamentally different ethical foundation than clinician dominated ones. They do not position autistic people as objects of intervention, but as collaborators and knowledge holders.

Research from disability studies and mental health peer support literature consistently shows that peer led programs produce outcomes that traditional clinical models struggle to achieve, including sustained engagement and lower rates of coercive escalation. These programs are currently underfunded not because they are ineffective, but because they challenge professional hierarchies. ABA’s dominance has made it difficult for autistic led initiatives to access stable funding, despite their demonstrated benefits. Removing ABA’s gatekeeping role would allow these programs to scale, professionalize on their own terms, and build durable infrastructure.

Family support would also change form. Under an ABA centered model, families are often trained to become compliance enforcers, tasked with implementing behavior plans across every domain of the child’s life. This contributes to parental burnout, moral distress, and adversarial family dynamics. Alternative models focus on helping families understand autistic neurobiology, sensory needs, communication differences, and energy limitations. Family systems approaches that emphasize accommodation, co regulation, and mutual adaptation are associated with better long term relational outcomes than those that train parents to extinguish behaviors.

Without ABA, parent education would shift away from control and toward partnership. Families would be supported in changing environments and expectations rather than changing their child. This reduces conflict, improves attachment, and is particularly important for families navigating additional systemic stressors such as poverty, racism, or immigration precarity.

Inclusive education supports would also expand beyond one to one behavior aides and segregated classrooms. Research on inclusive education consistently shows that autistic students benefit more from universal design for learning, predictable routines, sensory safe spaces, flexible communication options, and access to supportive relationships than from constant behavioral monitoring. When schools are no longer pressured to demonstrate behavioral normalization, they are freer to design environments that reduce distress for all students. Universal design reduces the need for individualized crisis management by addressing barriers at the system level.

Autistic led navigation, advocacy, and community infrastructure would become central rather than supplementary. Many autistic people and families already rely on informal networks, online communities, and mutual aid to navigate education, healthcare, and adulthood. These supports are often more responsive and humane than formal services, but they operate without stable funding or institutional recognition. A post ABA landscape would allow these networks to be formalized, compensated, and integrated into service systems without being co opted into compliance frameworks.

Mental health support for autistic people would also shift meaningfully. Currently, autistic people are frequently funneled into therapies that treat distress as individual pathology rather than as a response to chronic invalidation, sensory trauma, and forced masking. Trauma informed, neurodivergent affirming mental health care that recognizes burnout, dissociation, and identity erosion as structural outcomes is already associated with better engagement and reduced self blame. Removing ABA would reduce pressure to pathologize autistic coping and open space for care that addresses the real sources of distress.

None of these alternatives are hypothetical. They already exist. They are already supported by evidence. They are already being used successfully by autistic people and families who can access them. What they lack is not proof of effectiveness, but access to funding and legitimacy within a system captured by behaviorism.

The idea of a care vacuum persists because ABA positioned itself as synonymous with care. Once that equivalence is broken, what becomes visible is not absence, but abundance. Care does not disappear when coercive systems fall. It reorganizes around dignity, autonomy, and community.

The vacuum is not the result of abolition. It is the result of having allowed one harmful model to monopolize support in the first place.

Short Term Chaos and Long Term Repair

Why Disruption Is Not Evidence of Failure

If ABA were banned in the United States, the immediate aftermath would be turbulent. That turbulence would be seized upon as proof that abolition was reckless, premature, or cruel. This reaction would be predictable, and it would be wrong. Disruption is not the same as harm. In many cases, it is the necessary condition for harm to stop.

In the short term, families who have been told for years that ABA is the only legitimate support would experience fear and uncertainty. This fear would be amplified by institutions and media outlets invested in maintaining the status quo. Parents would be warned that their children would regress, that schools would be unmanageable, that safety would be compromised. These warnings would feel credible because the system deliberately prevented families from accessing alternatives. The distress would be real, but it would be manufactured by dependency, not by abolition itself.

Service infrastructure would convulse. Clinics would close. Insurance systems would scramble to redefine coverage. School districts would face pressure to redesign support models they had outsourced to behaviorism. Lawsuits would be filed. Trade organizations would mobilize. None of this would indicate that autistic people cannot be supported without ABA. It would indicate that an industry accustomed to monopoly is losing power.

For autistic children currently subjected to intensive behavioral intervention, the immediate experience of change would be complex. Some would show visible distress as familiar routines are disrupted and as the constant pressure to perform compliance is lifted. This distress would almost certainly be labeled regression. In reality, it would often reflect the unmasking of needs that had been suppressed under coercive control.

Trauma research is explicit on this point. When individuals exit environments where their safety depended on compliance, nervous systems often destabilize before they recalibrate. Emotional volatility, increased expression, and boundary testing are common in the early stages of recovery. This pattern is well documented among survivors of institutional abuse, domestic violence, and coercive religious environments. It is not evidence that the abusive structure was necessary. It is evidence that harm was occurring.

Autistic adults and adolescents, particularly those who have survived ABA, would experience the ban differently. For many, it would bring relief and validation. The recognition that what they endured was not therapeutic but harmful would represent a rare moment of moral acknowledgment. That recognition matters. Trauma is compounded when harm is denied. Public acknowledgment does not erase injury, but it interrupts the gaslighting that prevents healing.

Over time, as alternative supports scale and stabilize, the system would begin to repair itself. This repair would not look like a neat replacement of one service with another. It would look like decentralization. More programs. More variation. More community based solutions responsive to local needs. This diversity is often framed as inefficiency, but in public health and disability support, it is a strength. Monocultures are fragile. Ecosystems are resilient.

Within several years, the narrative around autism would begin to shift. When a state bans a practice, it communicates a moral boundary. Corporal punishment bans reframed children’s rights. Conversion therapy bans reframed queerness as something that should not be eradicated. An ABA ban would signal that autistic traits are not pathologies to be corrected, but expressions of human variation that deserve protection.

This cultural shift would have downstream effects on education, healthcare, and employment. Schools would be incentivized to design environments that accommodate difference rather than outsource control. Healthcare providers would be forced to confront the role of sensory trauma and communication barriers in patient outcomes. Employers would have fewer excuses to demand conformity at the expense of wellbeing. None of these changes would happen overnight. They would unfold unevenly, contested at every step. That is how structural change always occurs.

The long term repair would also be generational. Children who grow up without intensive compliance training would enter adolescence and adulthood with a different relationship to their own needs and boundaries. They would be less likely to equate worth with performance, less likely to internalize distress as failure, and more likely to seek support without shame. These are not small outcomes. They are foundational determinants of mental health.

Critics would continue to point to isolated crises as evidence that abolition failed. But crises already exist under the current system. Autistic people already experience disproportionate rates of psychiatric hospitalization, school exclusion, unemployment, and suicide. The difference is that these outcomes are currently treated as individual tragedies rather than as predictable products of a harmful system. Abolition makes that causality harder to ignore.

Disruption feels dangerous when stability is built on harm. The chaos that follows abolition is not a collapse of care. It is the sound of a system being forced to confront realities it has long suppressed.

What Justice Requires

Ending the Right to Harm and Refusing to Rebuild It Softly

If ABA were banned and the system were allowed to move through disruption toward repair, the final question would not be whether the transition was uncomfortable. It would be whether the outcome was just. Justice is not measured by how gently institutions land when their authority is withdrawn. It is measured by whether harm stops, whether power is redistributed, and whether the people most affected gain control over the conditions of their lives.

Justice requires clarity. It requires naming that ABA was not simply imperfect, but structurally violent. It requires rejecting the fiction that autistic suffering was an unfortunate side effect of good intentions rather than a predictable outcome of a system designed to suppress difference. Without this clarity, abolition collapses into reform, and reform collapses into rebranding. The cycle begins again.

Justice also requires boundaries. Not everyone who participated in ABA will be able to remain in autism related work. This is not about vengeance or moral purity. It is about safety. A system that allowed widespread coercion did so because it trusted the wrong people with too much power. Correcting that error means accepting that some forms of authority must be permanently relinquished. Loss of access is not cruelty. It is the price of accountability.

Crucially, justice does not require universal forgiveness. Autistic people are not obligated to reconcile with those who harmed them, to endorse redemption narratives, or to accept proximity as proof of progress. Forgiveness is a personal moral choice. Justice is a collective ethical responsibility. Confusing the two has repeatedly placed autistic people in harm’s way.

Justice requires redistribution. For decades, resources flowed toward institutions that promised normalization while starving community based, autistic led, and autonomy centered supports. Ending ABA without redirecting funding would reproduce inequality under a new name. Public dollars must be reallocated toward communication access, sensory safe environments, peer support, inclusive education, family accommodation, and autistic governed infrastructure. Anything less is symbolic change without material impact.

Justice requires epistemic humility. The authority to define autism has long rested with those least affected by its consequences. A just system centers autistic knowledge not as anecdote, but as expertise. This means autistic people leading research agendas, designing services, governing institutions, and setting ethical boundaries. Lived experience is not a supplement to science. It is a corrective to its misuse.

Justice also requires patience. The harms of ABA were accumulated over generations. Their repair will not be immediate. Trauma does not resolve on policy timelines. Cultural narratives do not shift without resistance. There will be backlash. There will be missteps. There will be moments when the absence of a familiar structure feels frightening. None of this invalidates the necessity of abolition. It confirms it.

Most importantly, justice requires refusing to rebuild harm in softer forms. History shows that when a practice is discredited, its logic often survives by adopting the language of its critics. Control becomes support. Compliance becomes readiness. Suppression becomes resilience. Vigilance is required to ensure that autonomy is not quietly replaced with obligation once again.

Abolition is not the end of care. It is the end of the assumption that care requires control. It is the end of a professional entitlement to shape autistic lives according to normative ideals. It is the end of a system that treated autistic humanity as conditional.

What replaces it will not be perfect. No system is. But it will be grounded in a different moral starting point. That autistic people are not problems to be solved. That their ways of being are not obstacles to overcome. That safety, dignity, and self determination are not rewards for good behavior, but rights.

That is what justice requires.

Reflection Questions

For Autistic Readers

What parts of this analysis resonated with experiences you have had but were previously told did not count as harm? Where were you asked to interpret distress as progress, or compliance as success, and what did that require you to give up about yourself in order to survive? How has your relationship to your own body, communication, or boundaries been shaped by systems that treated those things as problems to manage? What would support have looked like if it had been designed around your autonomy rather than your performance? As you imagine a world without coercive autism interventions, what feels relieving, and what feels frightening, and why? What kinds of care have you already found outside formal systems that have sustained you in ways institutions did not?

For Parents and Caregivers

What assumptions about autism were you given when you were first told ABA was necessary, and who benefited from those assumptions? How were your fears about your child’s future shaped by professionals who positioned themselves as the only solution? In what ways were you asked to become an enforcer rather than a partner to your child, and how did that affect your relationship over time? What signals of distress or resistance were you encouraged to reinterpret or ignore, and what did that cost your family? If support were reframed as changing environments rather than changing your child, what possibilities would open that were previously unavailable to you?

For Educators and School Leaders

How has behavioral compliance been used as a proxy for learning, safety, or readiness in your setting? What kinds of autistic expression are treated as disruptions rather than communication, and how does that shape disciplinary responses? In what ways has reliance on behavioral aides or plans allowed systems to avoid redesigning classrooms, schedules, and expectations? If autistic distress were understood as evidence of environmental failure rather than student failure, what structural changes would become necessary? What would it mean for your institution to be accountable not only for academic outcomes, but for long term wellbeing?

For Clinicians and Service Providers

What beliefs about autism underpinned your training, and where did those beliefs come from? How were autistic voices positioned in your education, as sources of knowledge or as data points to be managed? When confronted with autistic testimony of harm, how were you taught to respond, and what alternatives were discouraged? What would ethical practice require if you accepted that good intentions do not negate impact? If continued proximity to autistic people were no longer assumed, how might your sense of professional identity need to change?

For Researchers and Academics

What paradigms have been treated as authoritative in your field, and which ways of knowing have been dismissed as unscientific? How has methodological convenience shaped what questions were asked and which outcomes were valued? In what ways has autistic exclusion from knowledge production been normalized or justified? What responsibility do academic institutions have when the frameworks they legitimize cause harm? If autistic people were centered as epistemic authorities rather than research subjects, how would research design, ethics, and interpretation change?

For Policymakers and Funders

What interests have shaped which autism supports are reimbursed, regulated, or mandated? How have economic incentives influenced definitions of evidence and effectiveness? Whose testimony has been treated as credible in policy decisions, and whose has been dismissed? What harms have been tolerated because they were framed as necessary or inevitable? If preventing trauma were treated as a core public health goal, how would funding priorities shift? What would accountability look like for systems that profited from practices now recognized as harmful?

For Institutions and Organizational Leaders

How does your organization respond when harm is named by those it serves? What mechanisms exist for accountability that do not rely on rebranding or public relations? Where does power concentrate when change is framed as technical rather than moral? What losses are you unwilling to contemplate, and why? If legitimacy were contingent on safety rather than tradition, what structures would need to be dismantled? What would it mean to relinquish control rather than manage dissent?

For Allies and the General Public

What narratives about autism have you absorbed without questioning because they were presented as scientific or compassionate? How has discomfort with difference influenced what kinds of support you assume are necessary? When autistic people describe harm, what instincts arise in you to defend systems rather than listen? What would solidarity look like if it required challenging institutions rather than expressing sympathy? How might your understanding of care change if autonomy were treated as non negotiable?

Reflection Questions for People Inside the ABA Ecosystem

For Current and Former ABA Providers

What assumptions about autistic people made your work feel justified or necessary at the time? When autistic people expressed distress, resistance, or withdrawal, how were you trained to interpret those responses, and what interpretations were discouraged? At what points did you encounter autistic criticism of ABA, and how were you taught to dismiss or neutralize it? What would it mean to acknowledge that harm occurred even if you believed you were helping? If you accept that consent was not meaningfully possible within the structure of your work, what ethical obligations follow from that realization? What forms of power over autistic people are you willing to permanently relinquish, even if doing so requires leaving the field?

For ABA Professors, Researchers, and Academic Leaders

What theoretical commitments underpinned the curriculum you taught or defended, and how explicitly did they frame autistic difference as a deficit requiring correction? How were autistic scholars and critiques positioned within your department, and what mechanisms existed to exclude them from legitimacy? When evidence of harm emerged, how did your institution respond, and what interests shaped that response? What responsibility do you bear for training generations of practitioners to enact coercive practices under the authority of science? If ABA were discredited as a paradigm, what would ethical accountability require of you beyond revising syllabi or language?

For ABA Graduate and Undergraduate Students

Why did you enter this field, and what needs or narratives led you to believe ABA was a helping profession? What were you taught about autistic self advocacy, and whose voices were presented as authoritative? How did your training encourage you to interpret compliance as progress and distress as resistance? If you now recognize that the field you trained for may be structurally harmful, what are you grieving, and what responsibilities accompany that grief? How might your skills and labor be redirected in ways that do not require control over autistic people?

For Behavior Technicians and Frontline Staff

What moments in your work felt ethically uncomfortable, even if you did not yet have language for why? How were your doubts framed by supervisors or training programs? What pressures were placed on you to prioritize data collection, protocol adherence, or productivity over the lived experience of the autistic person in front of you? If you were asked to ignore or suppress your own moral instincts, what impact did that have on you? What would it mean to refuse participation in practices you now understand as harmful?

For Certification Boards and Professional Associations

What standards of evidence and ethics did you use to evaluate harm, and whose testimony was considered credible in that process? How did financial incentives, professional expansion, or political influence shape your decisions? When autistic people called for abolition rather than reform, how did you respond, and why? What responsibility do you have for sustaining a system that privileged professional authority over disabled lives? If your organization were dissolved, what repair would you owe to the community whose trust you violated?

For Private Equity Firms and Corporate Leaders in ABA

At what point did profit become inseparable from coercion in your business model? How did growth targets, billing structures, and labor practices incentivize volume over wellbeing? What risks were knowingly transferred to autistic children and families in order to secure returns? If ABA were banned, what obligations would you have to contribute to restitution rather than reinvention? What does ethical exit look like when an industry’s success depended on the normalization of harm?

Closing

After the Question Is Finally Answered

There is a reason the question of banning ABA is treated as unspeakable. It forces a reckoning that cannot be managed through tweaks, training modules, or softer language. It forces institutions to admit that something widely normalized was wrong. It forces professionals to confront the possibility that their authority was built on harm. And it forces society to decide whether autistic lives are worth protecting even when doing so is inconvenient, expensive, or destabilizing.

This article does not pretend that abolition would be simple or painless. It would not be. Systems built on coercion rarely dissolve quietly. They resist. They litigate. They moralize their own survival. But difficulty has never been a defensible reason to continue inflicting harm. The question is not whether banning ABA would cause disruption. It is whether continuing to sanction it is ethically defensible given what autistic people have been saying, consistently and at great personal cost, for decades.

What emerges across every section of this analysis is the same underlying truth. The greatest risk has never been the absence of ABA. The greatest risk has been the insistence that autistic people must be shaped, corrected, or normalized in order to deserve care. That insistence has cost lives. It has fractured families. It has produced generations of autistic adults struggling to rebuild trust in their own bodies, perceptions, and needs.

Abolition is not a claim that support is unnecessary. It is a refusal to accept support that requires self erasure as its price. It is a demand that care be rooted in consent, autonomy, access, and dignity rather than compliance. It is an insistence that autistic people are not problems to be solved, but people whose lives are worth designing systems around.

What happens after abolition is not chaos forever. It is a reorientation. Away from professional entitlement. Away from corporate monopolies. Away from academic paradigms that mistake control for rigor. And toward community, access, relationship, and self determination. Toward supports that already exist but have been starved of legitimacy. Toward autistic led knowledge, governance, and care.

The hardest part of this conversation is accepting that some losses are necessary. Some careers will end. Some institutions will close. Some identities built around being a helper will need to be relinquished. These losses matter. But they do not outweigh the moral obligation to stop doing what we now know causes harm. Justice has never required that everyone emerge unscathed. It requires that harm stop being treated as acceptable.

The future this article gestures toward is not perfect. No future is. But it is one in which autistic children are not trained to disappear in order to survive. One in which autistic adults are not told their trauma is anecdotal. One in which care does not require submission. One in which difference is met with design rather than discipline.

The question has been avoided for a long time. What would happen if ABA were banned. Now that it has been asked honestly, the answer is no longer terrifying.

What would happen is that harm would finally have to justify itself.

And it cannot.