That’s not eugenics. It’s choice!

Holy shit, this is immoral.

As I wrote of Singer previously, when you travel down this path, you have to ask if the world is made for you. Is the world comfortable for people like you? Is it safe? Is it just? If the world is made for you, then perhaps it makes sense to turn it away from the lives of others. But if it is not, then i suggest that you join all of us for whom it is not made, and make as much common cause as you can.

Throwing up terms such as “clouded”, “frustrated,” and “un-realized” to describe the lives and potentials of those with disabilities, Singer engages in a dilettante’s defense of genocide, a casual argument for the annihilation of countless people. What is a frustrated life? To be queer in a straight society? A woman under pressure from a patriarchal culture? To be a person of color in a white dominated world?

Living as a person in a “world system whose major economic impulses and cultural investments are directed away” from you? (Bhabha, LoC, as always) This world is not made for a person with disabilities, and the structure of the assumptions of society enforce an exclusion that is both casual and active. The stairs to a courthouse bar access just as much as the prejudice one might encounter within. This world is not made for a person with disabilities, and I will tell you that this is a choice. Is the world made for you?

The rest of this post is from what i commented there.

First, let’s blow the “it’s the mother who bears the burden” argument away. It’s hardly her sole domain, and it’s insufficient to mention parents who aren’t the birth mother…assuming that there is one.

Further more, since when was the responsibility of a child solely the domain of parents? What parent of a able bodied child doesn’t get tax breaks, the offer of public education, opportunities for insurance for their child. etc.. I’ve been in NYC this past week, and there are billboards all over about the summer meals program, to let parents know that food subsidies are available at public schools for their kids. As insufficient as many of these supports are, they reveal a recognition how ever slim, that the work of raising children is communal. No child may be left soley at the discretion of those who raise hir. The existence of a child is one of stewardship, the guard and watch of one who will become a agent and self unto their own.

So why don’t we offer respite care? In home nursing? Support for caregivers?

That certain lives are marginalized or made difficult is not an ontological fact. It is a social reality created by the choices we make and don’t make.

There are plenty of genetic conditions that America makes difficult…but with most of them, we have at least begun to realize that there are social choices afoot. Incorrect ones, that assign difficulty and stigma unjustly.

Disability is social. Not medical.

We could choose to make it easier to live for these people, support their families in loving them.

We choose to call them burdens, and call their lives expendable.

What does that say?

-sly