Chuck Grimes wrote:
>
Stiker:
> ``A society reveals itself by the way in which it treats certain
> significant phenomena. The problem of disability is one such
> phenomenon. To speak at all pertinently of disabled people is to
> disclose a society's depths. It amounts to say that a book like this
> one, which is not divorced from praxis, is on a theoretical level from
> the very outset, on the level of the sociability (or sociableness:
> Fr. _sociabilite_) of a society, by which I mean its fundamental
> capacity to have people live together plus the anthropological
> information on the social competency.
>
He should have put the word "problem" in quotations. I saw Stiker make a presentation at the Society for Disability Studies. He did not seem to make the discrimination connection at all. He did not mention economics in his presentation, he just showed historic pictures (art engravings) of disabled persons. Maybe he was reluctant to make a strong presentation there.
How would Stiker explain this cultural product of France:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/14/international/14FRAN.html
>
> July 14, 2001
>
> 'Right Not to be Born' Upheld in France
> By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
>
>
> ARIS, July 13 — Campaigners for the disabled were outraged today at a
> decision by France's highest appeals court that gives a child born with a
> handicap the right to compensation if the mother was not given the chance of an abortion.
>
> The judgment confirmed a decision last November that was widely described as establishing in law a disabled child's "right not to be born." The appeals court ruled on a plea by the families of three children born with physical deformities who claimed that if doctors had not failed to spot the disabilities in the womb the pregnancies would have been terminated. The children are aged 9 to 11. One has a malformation of the spine; the others two were born with only one arm.
>
> The judges decided that the precedent set by the case — in which a mentally retarded boy was awarded damages because he had not been aborted — remained valid "as long as a causal link can be established with an error committed by a doctor."
>
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Nonexistance is preferable to disability in this equation. France is a country that may also be one that is close to legalizing euthanasia.
Seems to me that if euthanasia is legalized in France, the cheapest "remedy" for righting this "wrong" will be to euthanize the child in question. I'm sure that affected insurance companies, doctors, and hospitals would prefer it over handing over cash for the alleged damage of having been born.
Marta