It surprises some people when they inquire about NDY that we don’t describe ourselves as “prolife.” The reason we don’t describe ourselves that was is that “prolife” tends to cover a variety of positions, but first and foremost is the opposition to abortion. NDY, as an organization, doesn’t oppose abortion. We have no organizational position on abortion or any prebirth issues at all.
When it comes to the disability activist community, most in the US would describe themselves as “prochoice” on abortion, but also have concerns about cultural messages that convey the message that reducing the number of disabled infants born into the world is a laudable outcome of the increasing use of prenatal screening techniques.
NDY keeps these issues separate – we have our hands full with threats to the lives of people with disabilities after we’re born.
Once in awhile, some story or article ties the two issues together, and we get a lot of pointers to the item, with suggestions we say or do something about it.
One of those occasions occurred almost three weeks ago, when columnist Virginia Ironside was interviewed on a BBC show. Beginning with an assertion that the termination of a pregnancy to avoid the birth of a disabled child was a “selfless” act, she went on to talk about her willingness to smother any suffering infant or child.
Clair Lewis, a disability activist in the UK, participated as a call-in on the show and she wrote about it at the blog Heresy Corner:
It is fascism masquerading as equality politics when we try to pass off disability discrimination and prejudice like this as feminism. The welfare of women and disabled people are not opposed and this is not a competition for a limited quantity of equality and rights. It is misuse of the platform of women’s rights and insulting to twist debates about our right to choose whether to be pregnant, or not, into opportunities to peddle a moral obligation to kill disabled infants. It is a distortion and conflation of two separate issues.
In the following week, I discussed this issue with some disability activists in the US. In the course of those discussions, I found that a group of women active in disability rights and reproductive rights were working on a statement, which would also cover concerns over issues that went virtually unmentioned in the news coverage of the Nobel Prize awarded to Robert Edwards, who pioneered in vitro fertilization.
Here is an excerpt from the letter/call to action on the Generations Ahead website. It’s titled Robert Edwards, Virginia Ironside, and the Unnecessary Opposition of Rights. Here is an excerpt:
As people committed to both disability rights and reproductive rights, we believe that respecting women and families in their reproductive decisions requires simultaneously challenging discriminatory attitudes toward people with disabilities. We refuse to accept the bifurcation of women’s rights from disability rights, or the belief that protecting reproductive rights requires accepting ableist assumptions about the supposed tragedy of disability. On the contrary, we assert that reproductive rights includes attention to disability rights, and that disability rights requires attention to human rights, including reproductive rights.
We offer the following statement in response to two recent events that promote eugenic reproductive decision-making, and that further stigmatize disabled people by presenting disability exclusively in terms of suffering and hardship. Although seemingly disparate events, they share the presumption that disability renders a life not worth living and that people with disabilities are a burden on society. Moreover, they seem to imply that the only appropriate response to disability is elimination, thereby limiting women’s reproductive choices; they suggest that all women must either abort fetuses with disabilities or use IVF to de-select for disability.
Please read the whole statement – and you can sign on to it if you agree with it.
Thanks to Laura Hershey for her work on this statement and alerting me to it. –Stephen Drake
Thanks for putting this up. I am happily blown away by this statement.
You are on a roll–the last two posts have been outstanding. I understand why NDY does not take a position on abortion though I wish it would. The prenatal testing controversy desperately needs a progressive dissenting outside voice from disability rights advocates. I would also speculate taking a pro choice position would provide needed distance from right to life extremists.
I signed the petition. I agree with what I understand the position to be, noting that the language could be simpler for someone with severe CFS/ME, my major disability. I come from a high allergy/asthma family, noting that asthma/allergy seem to have a genetic component. My family considered asthma a dark secret, much like some families in the 1950s would refer to cancer as the “C” word. I knew my maternal grandfather died from asthma at age 38, but it was never discussed, nor was I taken to a doctor in the 1940s. (I am a silent wheezer, just cough. No doubt that’s how my grandfather was able to get off the boat at Ellis Island and stay in the U.S. People with lung diseases were shipped back to their point of origin in the early 20trh century.)
I am prochoice. I chose to have an abortion in the mid1960s when I became pregnant while accompanying my spouse, living in NOLA after a contraceptive failure. I was married; it was a joint decision. I could not get a medical procedure in NOLA and had to come to NYC for the procedure. I did not want to have a child at that time. I support a woman’s right to chose.
I am living with severe disabling illness (CFS/ME), with allergy/asthma as well. At 70, I have a “long” view of recent events. I did not think much about disability as a child. My father was disabled by WWII and my aunt by marriage was disabled as a child by polio. I had stereotypes about people with disabilities in general, yet when I visited a class of kids my age in a school segregated to kids with cerebral palsy, at age 13, I fit in and had a great time. Part of my own “distancing” from disability came from knowing that people with disabilities were segregated: I almost was put into a class for children with disabilities in the first grade – I am very nearsighted and was put into the class, on the floor of the school with no other classrooms, just that one and the cafeteria and auditorium, very briefly until someone said, why not get her eyes checked and glasses? I was then noticed as gifted.
My education in disability, my awareness began when I was an artist-in-residence in an elementary school in Brooklyn, and there was one child with a disability. He had a surgically constructed hand with three fingers. The ten year old said to me, “My hand bothers you.”. I said that it did and that I’d learn. He was a great teacher. I was able to take the skills I’d learned about adapting methods to fit doing art with disability to my own art work when I became disabled.
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Something rings hollow to me about the concern of those who would tell me or another woman to abort a fetus (to which I say, mind your own business, it’s my uterus) because it might be disabled or amazingly, someone suggest murder of a child who is born disabled or becomes ill.
What are the numbers? How many people are we talking about “saving” from a life of disability? (Much like during the Vietnam war – destroying a village to save it from “the enemy”.) My thought is that if the persons who want to save a child from an alleged difficult life due to disability, they would be fighting for a)end to cluster bombs, their removal b)removing all land mines all over the world and marching, making all kinds of noise to stop the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the raping, beating/cutting of girls and women. That would prevent a lot of severe disability and real anguish for children’s lives.
Bill,
I have lost count of the number of activists and advocates in the disability community who have said they wanted NDY to take up the “prenatal screening” issue. Not a single one of those people was willing to take up the task of forming a group devoted to those issues when I suggested such a group could be valuable and they could organize it.
There are many many problems with adopting positions on abortion and prenatal screening. Being “prochoice” would alienate the significant minority of disability activists – and social justice-oriented prolife allies, and it would be horrible to lose them.
Then there’s the problem of just what kind of position do we take? Are we for changing a law? Do we want to restrict pregnancy terminations for reasons of disability?
With assisted suicide, euthanasia, and other issues we’re dealing with, we can usually articulate how they relate to policy. That is, we want a law to remain the same, or we want to prevent a piece of legislation from being passed.
The bottom line for me is that I don’t see how this would enhance the main mission(s) of NDY. On the contrary, I can see that it could really detract from our core issues. So far, the NDY board sees things the same way. That could change, I suppose. But it won’t be a suggestion that comes from me.