I'm an autistic person who spends a lot of time providing medical care to other autistic people who are like your kids (i.e., profoundly autistic), so trust me when I say I know and appreciate the difference. I'd also like you to take a look at the ADDM data below (from doi.org/10.1177/003335492311…) to show trends in autism rates by "profound autism" categorization. If there were an "epidemic" of autism (debatable), these data unambiguously show one "non-profound autism" as being the driver of that increase in prevalence. Clearly, it's people like me more than people like your kids who are being diagnosed at "epidemic" rates, which is consistent with the expansion of diagnostic boundaries (though not inconsistent with a real prevalence increase of some kind, we just don't know how large—it may be totally inconsequential!). One other little bit of data that might interest you is the 2022 (most recent) state-level prevalence data for autism (cases per thousand) and ID within autism (%). The Pearson correlation between these two values is -0.651 (95% CI [-0.872, -0.208]), indicating a strong negative association between these two. You can run these numbers yourself—all the data are in tables 1 and 3 of cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/74/ss/s…. The point of this is that the higher the prevalence, the less intellectual disability they find. And that's not even intellectual disability in the "profound autism" range, which wasn't even reported in the most recent study! All of this to say that sure, autism rates are going up, but you're lying to yourself (and everyone else) if you think that the vast majority of those increases are severely disabled autistic people. They're not. I care a lot about the profound autism population (more than most autistic self-advocates, arguably), but I think it's highly disingenuous to try and use the increase in broad autism rates to try and scare people into providing services for profoundly autistic folks with a manufactured "epidemic". Look at the bottom of the graph once more—I can buy a 1.7x increase in PA over 16 years (with stable criteria), but that's far from an epidemic.