From the 1950s until sometime in the 1970s, doctors and psychologists were convinced that if a child was born autistic, the “fault“ lay with the mother. As David E. Simpson’s heart-wrenching film Refrigerator Mothers conveys, the guilt and shame borne by mothers of autistic children, initiated during this twenty year time period, is a burden that doesn’t go away. The film features several mothers, whose autistic children are now “adults,” who speak candidly about how, even now, they carry with them the unfortunate remnant of the horrendous guilt they felt as young mothers. As the viewer watches the mothers cope with their children’s various levels of autism, it’s clear that some of the stigma that existed decades ago for the mothers, and fathers for that matter, of autistic children, still lingers. NBB