Politics & Power Quote by Mary Bono

“Fastest growing” is a phrase built for a hearing, not a clinic. Coming from a politician like Mary Bono, it signals urgency in a way that numbers alone rarely do: it frames autism as a rapidly expanding national problem that demands immediate attention, funding, and legislative action. The line is less a medical claim than a rhetorical accelerant, designed to move budgets and headlines.

The subtext leans on a familiar political grammar: growth equals crisis. By calling autism a “developmental disability” and locating it “in our nation,” Bono folds private family realities into a public, collective stake. It’s an invitation to see autism not as a niche issue but as an infrastructure issue - schools, healthcare, disability services, insurance coverage - and to treat policy responses as patriotic caretaking rather than special pleading.

Context matters because autism prevalence has changed dramatically over the past few decades, largely due to broader diagnostic criteria, increased awareness, better screening, and shifts in reporting. The quote’s effectiveness comes from how it compresses those complex drivers into a single, memorable metric. That compression is also where it gets politically slippery: “fastest growing” can quietly encourage the public to assume a mysterious epidemic, which can fuel fear, bad science, and opportunistic causation narratives.

So the intent is to galvanize; the cost is that it trades nuance for momentum. It works because it’s a clean alarm bell. The question it leaves hanging is whether the alarm clarifies the policy need - or distorts the public understanding of why the numbers rose in the first place.