How the Pro-Choice Movement Excludes People With Disabilities
By Lenzi Sheible,
RH Reality Check
| 10. 17. 2014
Untitled Document
In a piece for RH Reality Check last month, Erin Matson highlighted anti-abortion groups’ false advocacy for people with disabilities. As Matson put it, it’s “well past time” for feminists to more robustly utilize a disability rights lens so anti-choicers can’t continue to monopolize the discourse.
It’s true that, for political reasons, we can’t afford for those on the other side to be the only ones talking about this issue. But I’ll go a step further: If we in the pro-choice movement don’t start paying serious attention to the ways in which our own practices contribute to the dehumanization of people with disabilities, we can’t claim to operate under a reproductive justice framework at all.
As Matson wrote, such a framework pushes people at the margins “to the center of analysis and activism.” For the most part, however, the reproductive rights movement has failed to publicly connect insidious abortion legislation with its effects on people with disabilities. In Texas, for instance, abortion advocates have heavily promoted discourse about how HB 2 has affected poor, rural women of color, especially in the Rio Grande Valley...
Related Articles
CGS is excited to announce the launch of a new anti-eugenics initiative that has been years in the making. Legacies of Eugenics in Science, Medicine, and Technology kicks off with a monthly essay series published at the Los Angeles Review of Books that will expose and contest the reemergence of eugenic ideas in contemporary health sciences, human biotechnology, public health, and medicine. Community and campus-based events featuring the authors are also being planned. The project is a collaboration among CGS...
By Jason Kehe, Wired | 04.11.2024
God help the babies! Or, absent God, a fertility startup called Orchid. It offers prospective parents a fantastical choice: Have a regular baby or have an Orchid baby. A regular baby might grow up and get cancer. Or be born...
By Neel Shah, The Preprint | 04.11.2024
Years ago, I interviewed for a residency position at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Standing before the domed Victorian building at the campus entrance, I couldn’t help but be in awe of the history of the place, the great...
By Eleanor Hayward and Joanna Crawford, The Times | 03.29.2024
Gazing out at the Mediterranean from an idyllic rocky mountaintop, Sophie Hermann announced to her half a million Instagram followers that she had decided to freeze her eggs. Since that post in August, the 37-year-old former Made in Chelsea star...