Abortion and Disability: Pro and Anti

NOS Magazine published an anti-choice and a pro-choice piece, back to back, last week. The anti was written by Ivanova Smith and makes this argument:

Even though some in the disability community don’t see this as a modern form of eugenics, I do. Eugenics is advocating for the death of those who are seen as a burden, as weaker or as an inconvenience. I understand there are situations where abortion is necessary evil, like if the mother life is at risk or if she was sexually assaulted However, I don’t feel a person’s life should be a choice because they are seen as a inconvenience or burden. We are human beings. even with the cases above a life was lost and that is sad and should be grieved.

I value my own life and life like me. We all just want to live, like any other human beings. I hope someday people will see this not as partisan issue, but a bipartisan issue that we can all agree on.

The problem here is that Smith mentions eugenics, but doesn't learn the lesson from it. The history of eugenics is not about providing widespread access to reproductive care to all women, regardless of their race, class, disability, trans or cis ... the history of eugenics is about the state asserting control over the bodies of disabled people.

Arguments for the coercive power of the state over reproductive access have never, and will never, work out well for disabled people. It is possible to assert the value of diverse human life without arguing for state coercion of women. It is, in fact, necessary to do so.

Fortunately, Shain Neumeier published a response that more than explains the problems with Smith's argument. My emphasis:

The hardest thing about the current framing of the abortion debate for disability justice advocates is that it forces us to choose between two of our core convictions: Inherent human worth and bodily autonomy. As a disabled person, an asexual non-binary person who was assigned female at birth, and an activist, I hate the ideas and circumstances that have put these principles in opposition to each other. Still, the choice is easy for me to make. My nearly absolute belief in bodily autonomy means nothing if I’d support forcing a person to remain pregnant and give birth against their will for any reason because of my own opposition to eugenics.

...

My opposition to eugenics comes as much from the coercion and violence with which it’s been carried out as from the underlying belief that disabled lives aren’t living. Legal or other limits on disability-selective abortion cannot and will not meaningfully address underlying systemic problems such as poverty and structural ableism in healthcare, education and employment that have perpetuated that belief and in doing so pitted disability and reproductive justice against each other in the first place. Their only purpose and effect will be to serve as a first step toward greater and more general restrictions on abortion and other forms of reproductive freedom.

A near-absolute committment to bodily autonomy  is, Neumeier argues, essential to the disability rights movement. Forcing women to give birth will be a wedge used to erode disability rights, not the salvation of disabled people.