On 29th March 2023, Claire Compagnon, Inter-ministerial Delegate for Autism, announced the launch of the Marianne Cohort. This large-scale epidemiological study (6 million euros), the first at a European level, aims to recruit 1,700 pregnant women to analyse the links between parents’ lifestyles and exposure to chemical pollutants in the foetus and child in the occurrence of autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD: dyslexia, dyspraxia and dyscalculia, ADHD, intellectual disabilities).
Today, these disorders cannot be cured. We provide better support, we correct the developmental trajectories, but we do not cure them. So we have to look for a cure.
Claire Compagnon, interministerial delegate for autism and neurodevelopment, Académie de Médecine, 29 March 2023.
As in the majority of autism research, ethical criteria will once again be flouted, as we do not know what will happen to the biological data collected, the samples taken from the babies and children of the mothers recruited. Worse, this data may be accessible to companies for their own profit.
Neurodivergent people have always existed. We are an integral part of human diversity, and historically disabled bodies have been used as objects of experimentation and enrichment by doctors and academics, without redress.
Psychiatry has always sought to legitimise our inequality before the law. It still hopes to define and find biological causes for mental disorders, in order to control us, to suppress us. The advanced technologies used do not change anything, this medical model of neurodivergences is a failure.
Like the research centre in Montpellier which has already spent 300,000 euros to show the link between glyphosate and autism, this new multidisciplinary research project is centred on a pathologising and eugenicist vision of neurodevelopment and explicitly seeks to find ways to prevent the existence of neurodivergent people.
The Marianne Cohort is part of the French context of attributing autism and neurodevelopmental disorders to the environment, and to parents’ lifestyles.
Who still needs the Marianne Cohort to know that pollution is harmful to all living beings? This project is yet another waste of public money, to the detriment of research focused on the accessibility of society to neurodivergent people.
Even for their families/parents, as well as for professionals in the medical/social field, the priorities are: improving mental health, reducing anxiety and learning skills for daily life. We do not want to be “corrected” by medical or psychological means, let alone cured. We want to live in dignity with the necessary means, but successive governments prefer to invest in destroying human diversity in the same way as biodiversity.
We refuse to be instrumentalised and stigmatised in the name of ecology, while the government takes no measures to protect the environment, and even criminalises its defenders by calling them terrorists. #StopCohortMarianne We therefore call on all mothers-to-be not to participate in this study, we call for a boycott of the Marianne Cohort.
From now on, we are launching the Stop Cohort Marianne campaign, and we call on all associations, neurodivergent people, health and social workers… to join us and relay our message.
Marianne Cohorte Website : https://cohorte-marianne.org/
Follow and join the campaign Subscribe to the mailing list (news, actions, coordination):
French MailingList : https://framalistes.org/sympa/subscribe/mariannenonmerci
French Twitter account: @boycottmarianne
