Disability Rights and Reproductive Rights

Elizabeth Picciuto and I collaborated on a piece in the Los Angeles Times today on abortion and disability rights in the age of Zika. Two key paragraphs:

We are parents of children with disabilities who are also pro-reproductive rights. David Perry’s 9-year-old son has Down syndrome. Elizabeth Picciuto’s 6-year-old son has Cri du Chat syndrome and microcephaly. Rather than limit women’s rights, we believe we must build a more understanding, accessible society that supports people with disabilities and provides services to parents. That’s how we can safeguard access to abortion while ensuring that it isn’t the only feasible option following a prenatal diagnosis.

And

The answer isn’t to force pregnant women to give birth. The best way to open up new possibilities for women after a prenatal diagnosis is to guarantee that disabled children are well-supported with the services they need, that they have adequate medical care, and access to great schools. If the Rubios and Pences of the world really want to make a difference, they could work to ensure that communities are empowered to welcome and include disabled people, not to shut them out.

Please read the whole thing!

Some of my previous pieces on reproductive rights and disability rights:

• For Parents of Children With Down Syndrome, ‘Abortion vs. Hardship’ Is a False Binary (Reproductive Health Reality Check, 11/18/2014)
• Down Syndrome and the Discourse of Abortion (Minneapolis/St. Paul Star Tribune, print edition 10/5/2008)
• Anti-Choice Legislators Try to Force Wedge Between Reproductive, Disability Rights Activists (Reproductive Health Reality Check, 1/16/15)

Zika, Abortion and Disability Rhetoric

The discourse around Zika has included a constant barrage of ableist language in which reproductive rights advocates suggest that a disability like microcephaly naturally means a mother would want to terminate.

There clearly is a problem with access to reproductive choice, but I always maintain we can make that argument without implying that disability equals a death sentence.

Here's a solid piece on the issues from Girl With Pen.

Whereas news stories about Ebola since 2014 have often included images of supine suffering bodies surrounded by white hazmat suits, recent images about Zika feature babies born with small heads on the laps of parents (interestingly, often with their own heads cropped out of the frame). The story of this disease is one of disabled children.

Schuetze, the author, handles the complex issue well, emphasizing the way that media discourse treats the babies as the disease and preventing the babies, through abortion or birth control, as the remedy. She concludes:

A life with disabilities has challenges and complexities that vary from one person to the next, but it is a life. We need to stop treating the birth of Zika babies as the outcome, the end point of the narrative of the Zika virus and focus on the lives the children and their families will live.

A simple way to begin focusing on the Zika babies as new lives and not tragedies is to change the language used to discuss them. A simple shift from “malformed” and “birth defect” to impairment or disability changes the story. Rather than a medicalized diseased body with its “defects,” we have a human being with a challenging life ahead.

I really like this post. Your thoughts?