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