as small as a world and as large as alone

10:09pm July 30, 2013

clatterbane:

about1000kisses-shy:

youneedacat:

nativeamericannews:

Payouts to NC eugenics victims could be modest

North Carolina forcibly sterilized about 7,600 people whom the state deemed feeble-minded or otherwise undesirable between 1929 and 1974. Some of the victims were as young as 10 and chosen because they were promiscuous or did not get along with their schoolmates.

I wish they’d stop the current sterilization still going on everywhere.

(But then so called feminists are too busy defending what happened to Ashley X.)

Why on earth are people defending what was done to Ashley? How is that even a thing?!

AFAICT without reading enough to make me vomit when that was going on, apparently some people can magically turn “I should be able to decide what to do with my own body" into “I should be able to decide what to do with a disabled child’s body, because bodily autonomy slippery slope blah blah blah". And not see any problem there, and get very angry indeed when anyone else points out that this is horrible and doesn’t even make sense if you are viewing disabled kids as human.

ETA: I’m sure there were other equally awful arguments there, but that particular one (which I saw in multiple versions) stuck in my mind for the WTFery. :(

Many of the versions I saw compared her cognitive ability (presumed, since it can’t be measured) to that of a fetus and said that if we have severely cognitively disabled (real and presumed, since nobody differentiates) people human rights, then we’d have to give fetuses human rights. And since fetuses aren’t people, neither is she.

Which. By the way. Was the ENTIRE REASON I made the blog post “politics, ethics, and mental widgets”.

Because in my eyes it is NOT OKAY. In a huge way. To make ethical decisions based on “if we did this, then we would have to do that” sort of thinking. You have to decide which individual situation is right or wrong. Not create systems of bullshit to justify more bullshit.

(And in my eyes the entire “is it a someone or a something, and damn you to hell forever if you use the wrong word” argument regarding abortion is wrong. The real question is does someone get to control what happens in their own womb? If yes, then whether the thing in the womb is an object or a human being is just angels on the head of a pin. What you decide to name it – thing or life – won’t change what it is, it’s just a word game designed to sway people’s opinions.  And it won’t change whether someone has a right to decide what’s going on in there.  So the whole thing of “if severely cognitively disabled people are people then so are fetuses”, besides being a horribly inaccurate comparison both scientifically and ethically, is a useless bit of language games.  And one that’s horribly damaging to boot. So people shouldn’t even be going there.

But they do. Constantly. So basically cognitively disabled people don’t get rights because it would (in the eyes of people who see cognitively disabled people and fetuses as both empty shells and therefore interchangeable and identical) ruin an already flawed system of mental widgets designed to get people to support abortion.

(Not that supporting abortion is wrong. I support it. I just don’t rely on ideological bullshit to prop up my support.)

And I feel very strongly that even though some people seem to need to rely on ideologies to function, this is doing it wrong. In a huge, damaging, dangerous, horrific way.

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