I’m disabled and need a ventilator to live. Am I expendable during this pandemic?
By Alice Wong,
Vox
| 04. 04. 2020
It is a strange time to be alive as an Asian American disabled person who uses a ventilator. The coronavirus pandemic in the United States has disrupted and destabilized individual lives and institutions. For many disabled, sick, and immunocompromised people like myself, we have always lived with uncertainty and are skilled in adapting to hostile circumstances in a world that was never designed for us in the first place. Want to avoid touching door handles by hitting the automatic door opener with your elbow? You can thank the Americans with Disabilities Act and the disabled people who made it happen.
Technology, accessibility, and a hardcore will to live shaped me into a cyborg oracle ready to spill some hot truths. I am tethered to and embedded with a number of things that keep me alive: a power wheelchair, a non-invasive ventilator that is connected to my chair’s battery, a mask that goes over my nose attached to a tube, metal rods fused to my spine. How I sound, move, and look elicits pity and discomfort by many in public. This...
Related Articles
By Shoshanna Ehrlich, Ms. Magazine | 04.15.2025
Promotional image from Natalism.org
A month into President Donald Trump’s second term, Sean Duffy, the newly appointed secretary of the Department of Transportation (DOT), issued a memo declaring that “DOT-supported or assisted state contracts shall prioritize projects and goals...
By Charlotte Graham-Mclay, Associated Press | 04.11.2025
A woman in Australia unknowingly gave birth to a stranger’s baby after she received another patient’s embryo from her in vitro fertilization clinic due to “human error,” the clinic said.
The mix-up was discovered in February when the clinic in...
By Berkeley Lovelace Jr. and Abigail Brooks, NBC News | 04.02.2025
By Kevin Davies, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News | 03.27.2025
Around 2018–19, there was not a bigger science and ethical story than the debate over heritable human genome editing (HHGE) and the scandal over the “CRISPR babies.” The scientist, He Jiankui, who attempted to engineer the germline of human embryos...