To hell with the evidence. What we need is a teenage mother to blame

IT came out in the small talk, as great truths often do. She has twins. Identical. Both with autism. That must, I suggested carefully, be quite a challenge?

"Not as bad a challenge as it would've been 20 years ago," she said, shrugging into her coat. "Back then, I'd have been a refrigerator mother."

A what? A refrigerator mother. Cold and unloving to her baby, who, having started out normally, would react to maternal chill by becoming autistic. It was a neat medical way of explaining the inexplicable and delivering a container-load of blame to the mother into the bargain.