Money.

Bob Wright who founded the organization with his wife was/is a lawyer, lobbyist and businessman, at the time they founded the organization he was chairman and executive of NBC. So he had the money and knew the right people.

I'm not OP, and I learned about AS only through this community but didn't investigate further (different continent). So I can only speculate: there's a lot of revenue to be made from therapy and pharma if you find a new niche. A fundamentally wrong popular bias, reinforced by pouring massive money into advertising helps that a lot.

To me it also smacks a lot like a part of that post-humanism psy-op. Some (influential) people really want to have "Brave New World" become reality (or "Gattaca"?) -- the "perfect" human machine; engineered and gated; divergence is a flaw. The rest goes happily with the narrative. There was someone posting their dismay about an interview with a person they previously liked, maybe already a year ago. The person in the interview was speaking of how autism should get removed from the gene pool ...