11:36am February 24, 2012

➸ What is ableist discourse according to Feministe?

draggle:

wanmaru:

allies-person:

The Feministe Comments policy contains this clause:

We will do what is possible to prevent publishing comments that are racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, or transphobic. (Italics in original)

I’m hardly the first to point out that this often does not happen. (Moreover, sometimes the…

I love how you completely ignore that the bulk of the discussion referred to the idea that there are real health problems (heart diseases, Alzheimer and leukemia) associated with DS; I’m sorry to tell you that heart diseases aren’t a social construct.

I have heart failure (and I wouldn’t if my parents hadn’t been the type to not want a disabled child, so does that count as heart diseases being a social construct?), and do you really think the social model says that diseases are surely caused by society? Of course it doesn’t, but we live in a society that all too often hinders instead of helps because it decides there are people who aren’t worth healing.

I realize that certain health problems are commonly associated with DS. I don’t think that means certain lives aren’t worth living however, unlike some of the posters there. Seriously, the posters who were indicating that people with DS and associated health conditions can’t travel or do art or whatever were full of shit.

But all of this is besides the point, anyway. There were people saying ableist things about components of disability which do not inherently cause pain or fatality.

In this particular contest I definitely feel as though people were using their concern for “health” as a cover for more noxious ableist attitudes towards people with intellectual disabilities. Somehow I doubt that these people would get as worked up about fetuses which test positive for heart defects.

It’s definitely a cover. It reminds me of having a conversation with a woman who became more and more aggressive during a conversation about fat. As the conversation went on, she insisted more and more vehemently that the only reason she was so over-the-top adamant about her right to say all kinds of unpleasant things about the psychology of fat people, was that she was just concerned about our health rather than our self-esteem. It went on like that for a long time. I don’t remember what finally got her to admit her real motivation. But it turned out to be that she didn’t like having to see and touch fat people on public transit. All the concern about health was just a cover for her disgust.

That’s just one of many times that I’ve seen people make universal statements about the health or some other aspect of a group of people, only for it to turn out to be a cover for something much more sinister or bigoted. I don’t believe most people who couch their aggressive views on being fat in concerns about our health, because people who are simply concerned about a person’s health, with no other factors involved, are not so hateful and aggressive and intense about the matter, nor so defensive if you call them on it. Health has become the ultimate defense for people whose real motivation is hatred, disgust, entitlement, and the like.

There’s also something disturbing about most defenses I’ve heard of eugenic abortion. From the way most people talk about it, they believe that fetuses are interchangeable in a way that makes no sense at all in terms of reality. So they believe that if you abort a fetus with Down syndrome and have another child, what you are doing is making the person who would have had Down syndrome into a nondisabled person. And they believe having a child that you knew would have DS, is the equivalent of giving a nondisabled child DS. Seriously. If you talk to people about this directly many of them will confirm that this is what they believe.

To me, that says several things. It says that the person in question is so lost in the world of abstraction that they wouldn’t know concrete reality if it bit them in the ass. It also says that they have a very selfish, self-centered view of what having a child means. By which I mean this: They consider a child to only have reality in terms of the child’s relationship to the mother. A child born with Down syndrome and a child born nondisabled are equivalent in all ways, they are even the same person, because they are not real except in their relation to their mother. So deciding which one to have, is not choosing one child over another. It’s choosing which body your child (the same child) will inhabit.

And I have talked to people who outright admit this view. They say that if you abort a fetus with Down syndrome and have a nondisabled child after that, the nondisabled child is the child the DS fetus would have been, only in a “better” body. At that point there’s no reasoning with someone because it’s clear their views are so steeped in abstract ideology that there’s no possible way to make clear what is really happening.

I’ve also heard people resist the view that a DS fetus is not interchangeable with a nondisabled one, on the grounds that to believe otherwise would allow all rationale permitting abortion to collapse. Because apparently fetuses are interchangeable because they’re not people (or human, or alive). And they’re not people because otherwise it would be wrong to kill them. And this sort of thinking – “I must believe something because otherwise I believe I would have to do something different, and I don’t want to do something different so instead I’ll believe things that fly in the face of reality” – is one of the big reasons I created my blog entry on mental widgets.

Mind you: I don’t think that you have to be anti-abortion if you believe that fetuses are not interchangeable. I don’t even think you have to be anti-abortion if you think fetuses are people, or alive (if they’re not alive then what the hell are they?). I believe all people should have a right to an abortion because we have the right to control what is happening inside our own bodies. And yes I think it’s okay to kill someone if their residence is inside of you, for that reason – they’re inside of you and you have the right to decide what happens inside of you. I don’t think abortion is a pleasant thing, even if you want to have one, but I think it’s a necessary right. So it’s totally possible to believe in abortion without using some of the ridiculous reality-warping arguments I’ve heard.

The reality-warpage isn’t there because it’s the only way, it’s there because it makes abortion more sanitized and palatable to a wider range of people – fetuses become abstractions rather than a messy reality – and because it prevents people having to think about that messy reality. By the way, the same sort of reality-warped rationale explain some of the intense defense of eugenic abortion. Because there’s a lot of people who would never believe in abortion if it weren’t for the fact that it can prevent disabled people from being born. And there’s a lot of ends justifies the means in this: Since abortion has to be legal on human rights grounds, people see it as bad to question any belief that could lead a person to supporting it.

The problem is that a lot of beliefs that lead to people supporting it, also lead to human rights violations for other kinds of people. For instance, many people believe it’s wrong to give basic human rights to people who have, or are believed to have, profound cognitive impairments, because if we start thinking they have rights then someone will want fetuses to have rights too. Seriously I heard this argument all the time when I was defending Ashley X. It was another reason I wrote my mental widgets article. So therefore it was “feminist” to believe that parents should be able to have a disabled child’s uterus and breasts removed, for any reason at all, because to give that child more control over her body would require giving fetuses control too. I could not make this up if I tried: they were comparing a seven-year-old’s rights to a fetus’s(*). This is why I made that video that went viral as well. Bigotry apparently inspires a lot of what I do. :-/ Can I take pictures of these kinds of feminists and write how inspirational they are?

Also just so I’m clear: Not supporting eugenic abortion doesn’t mean I would try to ban it or something. Besides being impossible, making someone keep another person inside their body against their will is still wrong in my book. Just because I believe something is usually the wrong thing to do doesn’t mean I believe it should be illegal.

And yet again the whole matter of eugenic abortion as “caring about people’s health” is not just messed up but also personal. All kinds of genuine health problems run in my family. And I seem to have inherited most of them. As well as being suspected of having some sort of thing that, like DS, usually but not always comes with ID, and goes with a lot more health issues than DS usually does. (Health issues I have, hence the suspicion.)

Whether I have that specific thing or not, it’s clear I have a shitload of genetic issues that cause both health problems and severe chronic pain. And I have this to say to anyone who would ever believe in preventing these things through abortion, who claims to be “concerned for my health”:

You are not concerned for my health. Nobody concerned for someone’s health says “It would be better if you never existed.” Nobody. Because you can’t both want a person healthy and want them dead at the same time. Dead is not healthy. Dead is kind of the ultimate state of not healthy. If you’re concerned for someone’s health, you want that person to exist and be healthy. You don’t want them dead and a healthy person taking their place. That’s eugenics, not health promotion. And if I die tomorrow my life will still have been worth it so don’t even bring lifespan into it. I know intestinal blockage is the most common cause of death in one of the things I may have, and I’m fine with that possibility. Better to live and then die that way than never live at all because someone else fears my early death so much that they’ll cause the earliest death possible.

There’s also this weird idea that if someone has a shorter lifespan then it would be better if they never were born either. So… basically it’s better for people to have the ultimate in short lifespans rather than only live to 40, or 12, or 3, or a few months, etc.? That makes no sense to me at all.

And there’s this weird thing that creeps into that mentality that confuses me as well. I know it’s rooted in something like disablism though. I’m going to have trouble describing it. Let’s say a girl lives to be eleven years old, when her life is cut short by a very aggressive form of cancer. After she dies, in other people’s minds something happens to those eleven years beforehand. They become foggy. Or they are outright erased in their minds, replaced by a sad story. Their grief flows backwards in time and contaminates her whole life. So instead of being a girl who happened to die at age eleven, she becomes a girl whose entire life was overshadowed by doom and became meaningless. Someone who was never really there at all, even though she was very much there.

This phenomenon becomes even more intense when the person was disabled, in pain, or very sick for all or most of their life before they died. At that point the overshadowing process starts young, maybe at birth, maybe even before birth. People don’t see a human being. They see a half-life at best. They see constant suffering. And their idea of what illness, pain, and disability means creates a grief that overshadows the person from the start.

And that, not a simple desire to prevent suffering, is behind a lot of the arguments that it’s better to abort someone than allow them to be born and live a life as whatever sort of human being they are. And this turns into the idea that people who knowingly have babies with these conditions are cruel or deluded. It’s beneath the snarky “go with God” that some people (even atheists) are told if they refuse prenatal testing. And it’s beneath the idea that since many people with DS get Alzheimer’s and die early, better for them to have no life at all. And the more activities a person can’t do, the more pain they are (or are thought to be) in, and the shorter the lifespan, the more vehement people become in their views. And someone like me – who, if I wanted and could have a child at all, would willingly keep even a baby with anencephaly for as long as they did live – would be considered some combination of cruel, deluded, incomprehensible, and irresponsible. But I have my reasons even if they make no sense to anyone else.

There are actually people who believe that anyone who knowingly has a disabled child (or even just people with genetic conditions that make it more likely) should be punished in some way. It should be illegal. They should have their children taken away. They should not be eligible for any form of government support or assistance of any kind. Etc.

And it gets even worse than that. Even people who claim to be all about choice and freedom when it comes to aborting disabled fetuses, tend to be up in arms when it comes to deliberately trying for a disabled child. Even through embryo selection, which doesn’t require abortion at all. Or through choosing sperm donors. Apparently all this freedom to choose only goes in one direction. Apparently choosing a deaf sperm donor in the hopes of a deaf child is the same thing as taking a hearing child and destroying their hearing on purpose. Right back to those interchangeable fetuses/embryos again. My question is – if they’re truly interchangeable then why is it good to pick one and bad to pick another? And why is adding a deaf person to the world worse than adding a hearing person to the world?

Because regardless of the abstractification people add to this debate. And no matter how much they try to obscure the issue with claims about health and the like. This is really about people. And specifically what kind of people are allowed to enter the world. There’s no such thing as Down syndrome separate from people. So eugenic abortion is never about preventing Down syndrome or preventing health problems. It’s about saying that a person with Down syndrome should not be allowed to enter the world, and that a nondisabled person should enter the world in their place. It’s about saying that people with intellectual disabilities, autism, health problems, whatever, don’t belong existing and other kinds of people do. This is about hate. Disablist hate. And the ultimate in hate: “You should not exist. You should never have existed. You should never have entered the world. I will do my best to make sure that people like you never enter the world again." There is no amount of fancy language or logic games that can truly obscure that.

I know, I really know, nondisabled people, how much most of you want to shield yourselves from the reality of disabled people’s existence. This is why there are separate schools for us and all kinds of institutions for us to live in. It’s why some of you kill us and most of the rest of you defend our killers. It’s why it’s perfectly legal in many places to abuse or even torture us. It’s all in the name of making us go away, even when it’s couched in terms of our well-being. "He will do better in a structured environment.” “She died. Her suffering is over.” “Electric shocks to the skin are the only possible way to control her destructive behavior.” But a lot of us can see through that bullshit. And we see through it quite plainly, when you murmur about our health while trying to make sure we never exist in the first place, and therefore never have health for you to pretend to care about.

And no matter what you do, we still exist. You can’t get rid of us. You shouldn’t even try. We still get born, even if some people try to screen us out. We still acquire disability later on. We are still an absolutely integral part of the human experience. And we are still you: because if you live long enough you’ll become one of us. (Gooble gobble.)

(*) It also scared the crap out of me on a personal level because I was once actually in a hospital situation where I could not communicate and was described by actual professionals as having “the cognitive functioning of an infant” – exactly what was said about Ashley when a hospital ethics committee decided to override her rights. And while talking to the right people would have solved the problem for me, I don’t trust that to happen in the sort of emergency situation that brought me there. It’s hard enough for a disabled person to get rights from those committees when we are known as able to think. Calling them ethics committees is one of the most Orwellian terms I’ve ever heard.

Notes: