Reproductive Rights and Disability Rights - The new wedge

New at The Nation:

Anti-choice activists have found what they think is a winning wedge issue: Down syndrome and other “sympathetic” disabilities. The latest attack was in Ohio, where, in late December, GOP Governor John Kasich signed a bill that bans abortions after a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome. Ten states have either passed similar bills or have presented them before legislatures. The function, and I suspect the goal, of these laws is not to improve the lives of people with Down syndrome or even to stop abortions based on prenatal diagnoses. Instead, the anti-choice movement is trying to use the public’s positive feelings about cute kids with Down syndrome, like my son, to undermine reproductive rights.

In response to these threats to reproductive freedom, I’ve had to start saying something new and difficult: If individuals want to terminate an otherwise wanted pregnancy due to a prenatal diagnosis, I support their decision.

I’ve spent many years now asserting the need to re-order how we ascribe value to diverse human lives. My son may not participate in the capitalist economy, live independently, or speak (he might also do all of these things!), but his value as a human is intrinsic. I’d like others to see it that way too. Selective abortion, as I’ve written for The Nation, reveals our attitudes about disability and other forms of difference. Still it’s time to affirmatively support the right to eugenic abortion, even as we fight the need for it. The struggle for disability rights begins with the affirmation that no one gets to tell anyone else what to do with their body. That includes abortion.

Red States and Disability

My latest in The Nation:

Mostly buried beneath early November’s onslaught of news, stories from Oklahoma, Iowa, and Maine reveal the ways that state governments, through both apparent incompetence and maliciousness, are failing disabled residents and their families. In the first two examples, disability programs are being cut as a result of self-imposed budget crises. In the third, the governor is using disability as a shield to ignore the will of the voters, while at the same time not serving disabled Mainers.

Oklahoma is the worst of the three. At the beginning of November, agencies received letters stating that the “ADvantage Waiver,” a program funding home-based care for disabled individuals and seniors, would lose funding as of December 1. About 21,000 Oklahomans will lose the care that enables them to live independently. About 10,000, according to the Department of Human Services, will be forced to move into nursing homes—except that the state doesn’t have enough beds in nursing homes. So disabled Oklahomans are caught waiting to find out what will happen: Will they be trapped in their homes without services? Will they be forced into nursing homes or Hospitals? Will they be abandoned?

The problem, of course, is money. The conservative state has stripped awayits tax base in a wave of Tea Party glee. Now it’s broke and, rather than raise taxes (a budget just failed to pass in special session), it is closing nursing homes and slashing Medicaid.

It's the Guns

In my latest for The Nation, I zoom in on a little clause in Trump's latest comments on mental health and gun violence. 

Trump’s comments on mental health are typical of Republican response to violence. He characterized the killer as a “very deranged individual” who has a “mental health problem at the highest level.” This was also his and Representative Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) response after the Las Vegas shooting. Republicans (and some Democrats) have been making comments like this for decades. On Monday in Japan, though, Trump added, “We have a lot of mental health problems in our country—as do other countries—but this isn’t a guns situation.”

That middle clause, “as do other countries,” is quite the tell. Trump regularly runs his mouth freely, revealing the subtext that lies beneath the usual GOP talking points. Trump isn’t wrong. Many countries have not adequately met the mental-health needs of its population. But linking acts of violence to people with mental health is gross stigmatization that belies the data. People with mental illness are vastly more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it.

Still, let’s take Trump at his word here and agree that around the world other countries also have people with unmet mental-health needs. And yet among 171 nations of the world, the United States is the clear leader in mass shootings. It’s the guns. Of course it’s the guns.

Policing and Disability: Beyond Training

I wrote a piece for The Nation on people with disabilities killed by police over the last week, writing that the number was four. It was, however, actually at least 9 (the information wasn't available when I filed).

My hope for this piece is to push back at the training and registry narrative that gets so much press, and direct attention (and funds! for the love of all that's holy, funds!) to people in communities instead of police departments. There are shifts to training that would help, but they should be baseline, not "special." I wrote:

So what do we do? When incidents like these happen, departments and some advocates often focus on two deeply troubling solutions: training and registries. Both are based on the idea that police just don’t recognize disability when they see it, or don’t know what to do if they recognize it. Instead, we need to reframe policing, decriminalize noncompliance, and remove police from as many situations as possible.

Please READ THE WHOLE THING.

Bodily Autonomy

It started with a tweetstorm in May.

Let's talk about #BodilyAutonomy as a core Democratic party value. A core American value. Is there a better term for it? More catchy? /1

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) May 8, 2017

Grumpy at the "let's stop with identity politics" takes, I offered my thoughts on how we might coalesce different agendas around the principle of bodily autonomy.

Yesterday, The Nation published an essay fleshing out my ideas:

As an advocate for disability rights, I’ve been seeking ways to link my core issues to those of other groups—people who prioritize reproductive justice, racial justice, decriminalization of narcotics, queer rights, antipoverty measures, and so much more. Each of us exists at specific intersections of needs and concerns. To win, we must find ways to unite our struggles without erasing our differences. One place they connect: the need to defend bodily autonomy.
“Bodily autonomy,” as an abstract philosophical principle, dates back at least to the ancient Greek philosophers. Over the centuries, legal scholars and political philosophers have thought hard about the relationship between rights and laws, the individual and the group, and the sovereign state and the autonomous individual. In American activist circles, bodily autonomy is most often invoked around the fight for reproductive rights. But what I haven’t seen is an effort to harness this principle in a way that binds our seemingly separate movements together.

PLEASE READ THE WHOLE THING.

CRISPR and Down Syndrome

I wrote a piece for The Nation on the Age of CRISPR. I argue we're going to need new approaches both to regulation and to our discourse around "normal" as we develop these new tools. I use the ongoing failures to change how we talk about Down syndrome as my example:

A few weeks ago, two stories crossed paths. In MIT Technology Review, we learned that, for the first time in the United States, researchers had used the gene-editing technique known as CRISPR to modify a human embryo. Several days later, CBS News released a report that through nearly universal prenatal testing followed by selective abortion, Iceland has virtually eliminated Down syndrome.

The CRISPR story shows that we are on the cusp of an enormous leap of capability when it comes to shaping the genetic potential of our offspring. Meanwhile, I’ve contended that the past decades of testing, genetic consultation, and decision-making about abortion related to prenatal diagnoses of Down syndrome have served as a kind of test run for the future of human procreation. Can we make informed choices? Can we understand that probability doesn’t equate to outcome when we’re talking genetic makeup? Can we use science to build a more just, happier humanity?

If what’s happening in Iceland is, indeed, a test run, it’s a test we’re failing. Prospective parents are making decisions based on fear and stigma, helped along by the medical profession. As our tools to make such decisions get even more powerful, we have to shift how we talk about genetic diversity.

PLEASE READ THE WHOLE THING.