Disabled Feminists Issue Statement: on Robert Edwards, Virginia Ironside and Unnecessary Opposition of Rights

It surprises some people when they inquire about NDY that we don't describe ourselves as "prolife."  The reason we don't describe ourselves that was is that "prolife" tends to cover a variety of positions, but first and foremost is the opposition to abortion.  NDY, as an organization, doesn't oppose abortion.  We have no organizational position on abortion or any prebirth issues at all.

When it comes to the disability activist community, most in the US would describe themselves as "prochoice" on abortion, but also have concerns about cultural messages that convey the message that reducing the number of disabled infants born into the world is a laudable outcome of the increasing use of prenatal screening techniques.

NDY keeps these issues separate - we have our hands full with threats to the lives of people with disabilities after we're born.

Once in awhile, some story or article ties the two issues together, and we get a lot of pointers to the item, with suggestions we say or do something about it.

One of those occasions occurred almost three weeks ago, when columnist Virginia Ironside was interviewed on a BBC show.  Beginning with an assertion that the termination of a pregnancy to avoid the birth of a disabled child was a "selfless" act, she went on to talk about her willingness to smother any suffering infant or child.

Clair Lewis, a disability activist in the UK, participated as a call-in on the show and she wrote about it at the blog Heresy Corner:

It is fascism masquerading as equality politics when we try to pass off disability discrimination and prejudice like this as feminism. The welfare of women and disabled people are not opposed and this is not a competition for a limited quantity of equality and rights. It is misuse of the platform of women's rights and insulting to twist debates about our right to choose whether to be pregnant, or not, into opportunities to peddle a moral obligation to kill disabled infants. It is a distortion and conflation of two separate issues.

In the following week, I discussed this issue with some disability activists in the US.  In the course of those discussions, I found that a group of women active in disability rights and reproductive rights were working on a statement, which would also cover concerns over issues that went virtually unmentioned in the news coverage of the Nobel Prize awarded to Robert Edwards, who pioneered in vitro fertilization.

Here is an excerpt from the letter/call to action on the Generations Ahead website.  It's titled Robert Edwards, Virginia Ironside, and the Unnecessary Opposition of Rights.  Here is an excerpt:

As people committed to both disability rights and reproductive rights, we believe that respecting women and families in their reproductive decisions requires simultaneously challenging discriminatory attitudes toward people with disabilities. We refuse to accept the bifurcation of women’s rights from disability rights, or the belief that protecting reproductive rights requires accepting ableist assumptions about the supposed tragedy of disability. On the contrary, we assert that reproductive rights includes attention to disability rights, and that disability rights requires attention to human rights, including reproductive rights.

We offer the following statement in response to two recent events that promote eugenic reproductive decision-making, and that further stigmatize disabled people by presenting disability exclusively in terms of suffering and hardship. Although seemingly disparate events, they share the presumption that disability renders a life not worth living and that people with disabilities are a burden on society. Moreover, they seem to imply that the only appropriate response to disability is elimination, thereby limiting women’s reproductive choices; they suggest that all women must either abort fetuses with disabilities or use IVF to de-select for disability.

Please read the whole statement - and you can sign on to it if you agree with it.

Thanks to Laura Hershey for her work on this statement and alerting me to it.  --Stephen Drake

Connecting Disability Rights and Animal Rights - A Really Bad Idea

Is there something in the air?  Earlier this year, a friend and former colleague introduced me to someone on Facebook - an amazing guy who has what looks like a bottomless well of energy and passion, judging from the status messages I see and the info on his info page.

Sometime after I posted this entry about the economic considerations that dominate decisions about whether to get medical treatment or euthanasia for a pet, I was drawn into a discussion with these two about linking animal rights with disability rights.  The concept wasn't new to me, as I have had a couple of individuals who are both disability rights activists and animal rights activists make a similar case to me.  The idea is that both animals and people with disabilities share common ground in terms of mistreatment, devaluing, and other forms of oppression.

My reaction then was the same as it always has been - I do not see any upside to linking disability rights issues to animal rights issues.  At least, I don't really see the upside for people with disabilities.

I've been checking around and it looks like - in some animal rights circles and in some academic circles - this argument is being pursued, although I don't think anyone's floated a trial balloon at, say, a national meeting of ADAPT.

Anyway, the conversation with the friends on Facebook led to a discussion of a possible inclusion of me articulating my objections in a proposed volume on Critical Animal Studies.  That fell through - due entirely to my failure to follow through on any of the necessary steps needed to prepare for inclusion in any kind of project like that.  My plate tends to be pretty full and once in awhile I get foolish enough to think I can add more to it.  The big problem, of course, is that I don't always inform people that my plate was fuller than I thought - and I just drop communication.

All this was a few months ago.  The reason I am writing today is that a few people on Facebook have shared and applauded an article they've linked on the site - one that makes the case that "choosing between the rights of nonhuman animals and the rights of people with disabilities is a false dichotomy."

The article in question, Animal rights and autism pride: Let’s heal the rift, is written by Daniel Salomon, appears in The Scavenger.  The article here is a shortened version that appeared early this year in the Journal for Critical Animal Studies.  While Mr. Salomon is making a case for linking the Autism Pride movement specifically here, it's obvious he's making a case for disability rights in general.

The article opens with this:

Peter Singer and other activist-scholars have established the philosophical legitimacy of discourse regarding animal ethics; thus, animal ethics can no longer be dismissed as sentimentalism by the Western intellectual establishment.

It's a bad sign when an article that looks like it's intended to make a pitch to disability rights activists opens by acknowledging the role of Peter Singer in legitimizing animal ethics. (Note - the second link on Peter Singer's name is to a recent protest letter endorsed by multiple disability organizations - the link in the article excerpt is to a wikipedia entry.)

You can read Salomon's article yourself, but his main message is contained here:

I propose a variation of the linked oppression model, namely that there is a correlation between how autists are treated by neurotypical society and how neurotypical society, as a whole, treats nonhuman animals, and that the causes of autist pride and animal liberation are intricately linked, interdependent on one another.

Both oppressions have the same primary cause: the ideology of neurotypicalism. When those without a fully functioning vermis, including autists and nonhuman animals, do not conform to the wishes of neurotypical society, neurotypical society starts to interfere with, censor, and control those understandings or behaviors which do not conform to neurotypical standards or desires.

This model is consistent with reality and it helps resolve the conflict between animal rights and disability rights which is manifested in some religious, ethical, and public policy debates.

Again, the emphasis here is on autism, but at least some of the arguments are aimed at a broader linking between disability rights and animal rights.

What's wrong with that?

 On one level, it could be appealing.  A glance at progressive sites such as Change.org or even the progressive publication shows that there are is space, acknowledgment and energy given to all varieties of human rights issues - and animal rights issues, but disability rights is absent as a cause or concern.  Who wouldn't want to grab onto those coattails?

Me, for one.

See, one thing that Salomon and others dance around is that if there is a "schism" between animal rights and disability rights, it's mostly been caused on one side.

• Glossed over in the article, the "father of animal liberation," Peter Singer, is an advocate of public policies that would legalize the killing of disabled infants and people of any age who don't meet his own criteria for personhood.  In a recent NY Times essay, he advocated a rationale for limiting the amount of healthcare given to people with significant disabilities relative to nondisabled persons.  This same person was honored and one of the first inductees in the US Animal Rights Hall of Fame.  In fact, the year that Peter Singer was honored, one session included a discussion of when killing is OK, with "defective" human newborns on the list for discussion.
• People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), arguably the most prominent animal rights organization in existence, has used ableism and other offensive tactics, in its media outreach.  This article gives a pretty good overview.

OK - so all I listed was two general issues, and even though most people can probably see that the Singer issue is a big one, a lot of people might think that shouldn't be an insurmountable barrier in and of itself.  I don't know if that's true or not, because there are plenty of other reasons for the disability community to steer away from equating our situations and struggle for rights with those of animals.

First, animal rights advocacy is a cause that operates by defining and advocating for a set of principles which should govern human-animal interaction.  It is not the animals themselves demanding this.  That doesn't mean the advocacy is meaningless, but animal rights advocates and activists can define the terms of rights advocacy for animals and never have to worry about the animals telling them they got it all wrong or that they want to speak for themselves now - which has happened to Jerry Lewis and Autism Speaks, to name two prominent organizations that have found that some people they advocated for don't agree at all with the agenda they've set.  So the most obvious connection between animal rights advocacy and disability rights falls in the area of people with significant cognitive disabilities.

That brings me to the second concern.  Aside from Peter Singer, there is a scary amount of support in our society for killing old, ill and disabled people - especially when significant cognitive disability is involved.  Often such killing is justified by making comparisons between the killing of old, ill and disabled people and the comfortable myths we have about the euthanasia of pets (namely, the myth that all or most pets are killed because they are dying and in unrelievable suffering).  When disabled people are equated with animals, it never works out well for us.

Think I am making too much of this?  PETA, which I mentioned previously, has been criticized because the organization kills most of the animals it takes in at its shelters.  Here is how Ingrid Newkirk, president of PETA explains the high kill rate at their shelters:

Most of the animals we took in and euthanized could hardly be called "pets," as they had spent their lives chained up in the back yard, for instance. They were unsocialized, never having been inside a building of any kind or known a pat on the head. Others were indeed someone's, but they were aged, sick, injured, dying, too aggressive to place, and the like, and PETA offered them a painless release from suffering, with no charge to their owners or custodians.

Translate that line of reasoning to humans with significant intellectual disabilities and it begins to resemble - and even outstrip - Peter Singer's suggestions for when it's OK to kill humans.  As Newkirk explains in this essay, much of what they see in animals is the result of irresponsible human behavior.  That irresponsible behavior has led to a drastic overpopulation problem with cats and dogs.  The failure of people to spay and neuter has compounded the problem.  So what they are doing may sound bad, but is understandable on some level.

But the animal with the biggest overpopulation and resource-eating problem is the human species.  Singer's policy proposals become highly defensible when oppressed, stigmatized, abused and neglected people with intellectual disabilities are situated similarly to our animal cousins.

At the very least, it's too irrational to expect people who make up the ranks of disability activists to want to build serious bridges with the animal rights community.  I can't see us joining hands with a group that holds Peter Singer in such high esteem and at best expressing "regret" for his writings on disability.

Maybe it's just that the animal rights community - or parts of it, anyway, finds it easier to forgive some things and to even find them praiseworthy - even if those things seem shockingly antithetical to your cause in the view of others.  That would explain why PETA gave Temple Grandin an award for her work in designing more humane and efficient slaughterhouses. 

Personally, I give Grandin credit for her work.  But I don't think I would be a big fan if I was against killing animals for meat.  Just like I don't think that Amnesty International would honor some warlord who made it a point to commit genocide in a humane manner.  It doesn't compute.

And the idea that disability rights and animal liberation are interconnected?  That doesn't compute, either.  --Stephen Drake