Anti-Abortion Bills and the Hidden Attack on Disability Rights
Activists have made it clear: Reproductive justice is a disability issue
The rights of disabled people are, suddenly, in the news. They deserve to be, but in the aftermath of the Texas anti-abortion legislation, disabled bodies have largely become talking points — a rhetorical device.
Award-winning essayist and journalist s. e. smith reports on “selective abortion” bills, which “employ a sinister disablism” that exacerbates the idea of the “justified abortion.” Essentially, the language suggests that some pregnancies can be terminated if there is a diagnosis of a disability — as though a disabled life were untenable while simultaneously flirting with eugenics. At the same time, those who support full abortion bans present themselves as “saving” disabled fetuses from being aborted, even though, smith explains, there is little evidence supporting the claim that people are more likely to abort if a child is disabled. Moreover, such bills suggest that disabled persons are never those who might seek an abortion — one more way in which they are desexualized, infantilized, or objectified.
The case has also been made by Marissa Ditkowsky, a disabled activist writing for the American Constitution Society. “We ignore the ways in which reproductive…
