Disability and Rationing of Care amid COVID-19
By Katrina N. Jirik,
Bill of Health
| 04. 13. 2020
As medical professionals and bioethicists deal with the conundrum involved in establishing rationing of care guidelines, the mantra of the disability community comes to mind. Nothing about us, without us.
As health care resources grow increasingly scarce amid the COVID-19 pandemic, states, hospitals, and individuals are forced to make tough decisions about the rationing of care. These decisions are often framed in terms of medical and/or legal criteria. However, many people, especially the physicians who make the difficult decisions, realize they have a huge moral component related to perceptions of the value of an individual’s life.
Various states have triage guidelines in place, which differ somewhat, but primarily reflect a utilitarian goal of saving the most people with the least expenditure of finite resources. This is where the societal issue of the value of the life of a person with a disability comes into play.
Many of the guidelines state that the decision to treat needs to consider co-morbidities and anticipated resource use in the future. This is updated eugenic thought, whereby you have only the survival of the fittest, with an assumed understanding of what “the fittest” actually entails. These conceptions are based on a medical model of disability, something many people with disabilities find extremely problematic. It’s also...
Related Articles
By Emi Nietfeld, Wired | 12.11.2024
FOR YEARS NOW, aspiring parents have been designing their children. Screening embryos for disease-causing genes during IVF, selecting their future baby’s sex, picking egg and sperm donors to influence their child’s traits. Today, a lot of those “designer babies” are full-on...
By Julia Brown and Daphne Martschenko, The San Francisco Standard | 11.23.2024
“Pronatalist” parents like Simone and Malcolm Collins want it all: optimized babies – lots of them.
To achieve this goal, the influencer couple from Pennsylvania is using an emerging technology known as preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders, or PGT-P...
Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay
It is hard to make predictions, especially about the future, as Yogi Berra, Niels Bohr, and other luminaries have remarked. But there are already signs that the incoming Trump administration may have some difficulty establishing consistent policies about controversial issues concerning human reproduction.
On the one hand, consider “the conservative blueprint for a second Trump administration.”
The notorious Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership seeks to delete terms such as “reproductive rights” from “every federal...
