kelley wrote:
> marta wrote
>
> >I don't like having the RTLs on this side of the issue, believe me, it is not
> >my cup of tea. One problem we have is distinguishing the disability
> >perspective from the RTL (who by the way are always eager to portray us as
> >RTL). I agree with you that abortion is a serious matter not like having an
> >organ removed.
>
> yeah, agreed that i wouldn't be happy about that either! but pramatically,
> it is true that this would make an argument like singer's dead in the
> water, even were we to have different views about infantacide.
We've been working diligently to expose Singer. I just was sent this excerpt from an article, Weisenthal certainly moves the issue towards its historical context:
Disapproval of Singer's views and his public expression of them has come from no less a figure than Simon Wiesenthal, the world's leading Nazi hunter. When Singer was invited to address a Swedish book fair in 1997, Wiesenthal wrote to the organisers saying, ``a professor of morals who justifies the right to kill handicapped newborns ... is in my opinion unacceptable for representation at your level''.
i do understand where you are coming from. as i stated at the outset of my
> entry into this, my mother almost had an abortion with me. so i've had to
> think carefully about this. the thought doesn't loom large in my mind--at
> least not the way the rtlers would like to believe it does! but
> nonetheless. now, she felt she couldn't have me because of public judgment
> not really because of economic circumstances. she was working three jobs,
> living at home and could continue to live at home, had no thought of going
> to college, though she completed her training as a beautician at the local
> beauty school and so had a skill that would support both of us at the time.
> the biggest trouble was illegitimacy and fear of judgment. she was so
> fearful that she never told anyone, save for one friend, and hid it til
> labor day and i was born 20 day later. amazing , huh?
>
> my point for teling this story is that attitudes toward what is and isn't
> desirable change. and another point is that there may be reasons for
> having an abortion that have nothing to do with economic constraints. a
> woman should be able to have one even if she's a wealthy 25 yr. old.
Attitudes can change and are influenced by such pressures as the stigma of illigimacy as you point out here and many other factors including the fact that some parents believe they could never handle having a less than perfect baby. I've heard this from the horses mouth, so I don't think we can ignore that parents are individuals and make their choices based on their own paramenters and influences in their lives. For example, many deaf people want to have deaf children..in that context it is seen as a positive. People are also influenced by notions about disability expressed by James Watson and Peter Singer. In the end, it IS the individual who makes the decision and the decision is made based on their realm of perception.
> which leads me to my concern about asche's argument is that, while i think
> it's wrong to abort simply because one is unhappy with the looks of a
> child, such views question the motives of an individual and judge them
> rather than viewing it as a social problem that is produced systematically
> by the capitalist, sexist, racist social relations in this society. in
> other words, the *cause* of those feelings and attitudes lies elsewhere.
I agree to a certain extent with you. Under capitalism disabled people have been devalued because they don't conform to being exploited - may of our bodies can not be pushed to produce the way nondisabled people's bodies can be used for this purpose. This is one reason you see so many disabled people trying to prove themselves to be as exploitable as anyone else.
Having said that, the facts are that disabled people have been killed under communism (the Chinese are really anti-disablement), the eugenics movement gained its largest foothold under the Weimar Republic in Germany where socialist doctors there promoted the killing of infants and disabled children. Hitler was not alone in his plan to eradicate the unproductive "useless eaters" he had plenty of help. The social Democrats in Sweden sought to lift the burden off the welfare state by sterilizing women thought to be capable of bearing disabled children, it goes on and on.
> i just can't see why constraining access to abortion will
> necessarily promote the oppression of the disabled. it seems to me that
> this oppression is rooted in many other places and is primarily and
> fundamentally located w/in capitalism though not entirely so insofar as it
> is a form of cultural imperialism.
I am not advocated the constraining of abortion. I am advocating for the involvement of adults with disabilities in the education of to be parents about disablement to counter the dominate negative stuff out there everywhere.
> so i would say that perhaps it isn't so much a tradeoff b/t women's rights
> and the rts of the disabled.
I don't argue the civil rights point until the fetus is born and becomes a "person."
> i guess i'd want to take a two pronged approach to the concerns you've
> raised here before. 1. changing the perception of bodily, physical
> perfection through education, media criticism and the like. 2. changing
> the conditions which make it diff for those who may not be so much
> concerned with 1 as they are concered about the difficulty in raising a
> disabled child. i'm sure i don't have to lay them out for you, but i will
> for others reading: better services, better education, new forms of
> parenting that don't lay the entire burden on the parents, obviously
> adequate incomes, sexism that means that women bear the burden of the mommy
> track and bear the burden of primary care more often than not.
Agreed.
marta