Autistic Thoughts

[Recent Entries][Archive][Friends][User Info]

Below are the 2 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Autistic Thoughts" journal:

October 10th, 2007

03:26 pm

Possibly the Most Disturbing Thing I've Ever Heard
( We now return you to your regularly scheduled random blogging )

Since the initial news about Katie Thorpe broke, I've been seeking out and reading a lot of posts both in reaction to her case, and older responses to Ashley X... and outside of the disability rights posters (and not even all of them), there's a whole lot of really ugly ideas being voiced. Even though I went into this expecting nothing less, the sheer breadth and depth and vileness of what I've been seeing is still painful.

And even then, some things stand out as especially awful. The fact that I could come across this quote AT ALL (let alone on a liberal, progressive blog, let alone without a single person voicing disagreement):

"Amanda's thread also had a poster who suggested that disabled people should have been involved in the decision-making process, which really creeps me out."

...I just can't even begin to format a coherent response to that emotionally, let alone rationally or verbally.

Current Mood: horrified
Current Music: Genesis- "Land of Confusion"
Tags: ablism, disability rights, sterilization

(Leave a comment)

October 7th, 2007

03:49 pm

[Link]

Ashley All Over Again
Nine months ago, a spokesperson for the British Medical Association responded to the news of Ashley X by stating "If a similar case occurred in the UK, we believe it would go to court and whatever decision was ruled would be in the best interests of the child."

They're going to have to make their ruling a bit sooner than they probably expected.

Not that this should really come as a surprise to anyone who was closely following the news about Ashley.

Katie can't speak, and they believe (or perhaps more accurately, assume) that she understands very little of what they say. To take away the "discomfort, pain, and mood swings", her mother and a team of surgeons want to inflict the discomfort, pain, and possible mood swings of a hysterectomy. Because she supposedly cannot understand menstruation and they believe that the natural functions of her body will cause her unnecessary indignity, they want to subject her to a surgery which she supposedly cannot understand and the unnecessary indignity of an unnatural and painful incursion on her body. She may never marry or have children or know love and consent to sex, but she will know the invasion of her sexual parts without her consent.

This isn't even a "pillow angel" this time, lying in a bed unable to lift her head or roll over. This is a fourteen-year-old girl who loves to go to theme parks and ride horses. She has a family who (supposedly) love her and who take care of her needs, she's described as taking joy in them and in her favorite pastimes- and yet her mother says "her life expectancy is poor". Puberty doesn't have to prevent Katie from doing anything she likes unless her mother lets it- it's not as if there aren't accessible theme parks or wheelchair ramps for disabled horseback riders. This is a disabled girl whose mother is determined not to let grow up into a disabled woman.

This is what comes of the belief that whatever parents of disabled children do to them must be right because "they'd never hurt their child, they love them!". This is what comes of having more sympathy for the caregivers than those being cared for. This is what comes of the infantilization of the disabled.This is what comes of the belief that a life with less ability is one with less quality. This is what comes of the idea that dignity is not something inherent but is something determined on a utilitarian sliding scale.

The United States overturned the compulsory sterilization of the cognitively and developmentally disabled in 1956; the United Kingdom in 1973. I pray that the inhumane treatment of Katie and Ashley does not signify the beginning of a return to those times.

Current Mood: enraged
Current Music: E Nomine- "Schwarze Sonne"
Tags: ablism, cognitive disability, disability rights, medical, sterilization

(3 comments | Leave a comment)