Tag: eugenics

rileydaughterofra:

tyse-has-unpopular-opinions:

juxtapoesition:

oistrong:

I’m all for fighting for marriage equality in the LGBT community. But we’re so focused on that no one knows about this problem.

W…wait Thats a thing????

Yep! The man I refer to as my husband? We aren’t actually married. We can’t be.

If I married him, the government would literally expect me to care for him and be his sole source of income. He would lose all of his benefits, including SSDI. Spouses are expected to share income and that effects ALL of his benefits, even his health insurance. We simply can’t afford to be married.

But it goes even further than that. If I were disabled, our incomes would STILL be combined, meaning BOTH of us would have our benefits cut.

For people reviving supplemental income, their benefits can be cut anywhere from 25% of their current income all the way down to 0%

In fact, one of the stipulations of receiving income under the adult disabled child program (which provides benefits for people who were disabled before age 22) is that they LITERALLY never be married.

I normally don’t link to blog posts as resources, but since social service resource sites like to dress this problem up and make it seem smaller than it really is, I’m gonna call it appropriate! Check it out!

https://www.advocate.com/commentary/2015/06/29/op-ed-why-no-matter-what-i-still-cant-marry-my-girlfriend

I’m upset about the situation in case you couldn’t tell.

Hrnngh… This makes me angry.

Source: oistrong

vivialopod:

tikkunolamorgtfo:

icouldbeclever:

rose-in-a-fisted-glove:

icouldbeclever:

tikkunolamorgtfo:

I genuinely do not understand this unrelenting insistence that we compare every horrendous thing the United States does to the Holocaust, when there are much better comparisons to be made to…well, the United fucking States. 

The United States has a long, sordid history of separating families: The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the families impacted by slavery for generations after being stolen from their homes and sold to the highest bidder, for one. The Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools, where Native children were ripped from their families in order to have their language, culture, and beliefs stamped out of them through forced assimilation and conversion to Christianity, for another. 

The United States has an awful history of putting people in detention centres: Japanese and Native Alaskan internment camps during WWII, Fort Cass, Fort Snell, and other Native American internment camps that Indigenous Peoples were forced into throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, not even to mention Guantanamo Bay, and the camps so-called dissidents in the places like the Philippines, Vietnam, and other nations Americans had occupied were put into.

The United States has always been horrible to its immigrants, specifically non-white and/or non-Christian refugees. My own grandfather, an immigrant form India, couldn’t become a citizen of the United States despite being a college lecturer and the spouse of a US citizen due to Asian Exclusion, and had to continuously enrol in university courses he never actually took despite the fact that he was teaching them, just to stay in the country on a student visa. The one truly valid comparison to the Holocaust era you could make would be to the United States turning away Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe aboard the St Louis and sending them back to their deaths because that same law used to keep my grandfather from becoming a citizen had been put in place specifically to keep more Jews and Asians from coming into the country.

Like, the United States is not “becoming Nazi Germany” all of a sudden. This is not some aberrant “UnAmerican” behaviour. This is the United States being the United States, doing what the U.S. has always done from the moment of its inception. 

Also, as one of my FB friends said on this topic recently: “Nazi Germany was not famous for cruelty toward asylum seekers, it was famous for making millions of asylum seekers and then murdering millions including many from my family.”

There is no good reason to constantly trot out bad Holocaust comparisons when we know damn well this is the same inhumane bullshit America was fucking built on. Hitler, Nazis, and The Holocaust are not just shorthand for “the government being really bad.” It was a specific atrocity that devastated the Jewish and Romani communities of this world, and you don’t need to constantly devalue it and re-traumatise Jews and Roma over and over again when you can just as easily condemn the heinous way asylum seekers at the US border are being treated by saying the United States is still in the business of systematic oppression and has not learnt anything from its own appalling history. 

So we have to wait a few years instead of preventing this? I’m so tired of the nitpickery.

My aunt came here seeking asylum from Guatemala in 1994. All she really has been able to get is a visa and she has always renewed/extended it. She has children who were born here, but this is what her lawyers have told her to do. In 2017 it was up for renewal and due to one DUI from late 2012/early 2013, which was barely above legal limit (and had it been someone without an accent that had been pulled over, there may have just been a warning). Since 1994 this woman has only had ONE bad mark on her record: that DUI. Her visa was not renewed. She is required to leave the country in 2021. She will not likely go back ti Guatemala. We are currently trying to figure out which country may provide better for her. Because Guatemala is too dangerous. People are still fleeing to this day.

Gues what? PEOPLE ARE FLEEING THE UNITED STATES TOO. Just last year, thousands of people fled America seeking asylum in Canada. I haven’t gotten around to the numbers other countries have seen, but those are American citizens, and scared Immigrants. And yes this has been going on for ages, but not in this quantity and not with the increases seen in the past few years.

Many Latinos are terrified and setting up plans to leave this country even though we are US citizens. Many of us born here.

No, there isn’t really a moment in US history where we are not treating people like shit and separating families, but how much do the common people empathize with those situations? They don’t, because it’s never as deeply talked about. Where in US history were those same people leaving for other countries seeking asylum? If that’s your qualifier: we got it. Murder? Done. Let’s add mass child-trafficking. Is this bad enough for you yet? Are we now being beat up on enough to join your hyper-exclusive club? Or will you not be happy unless we have stood by and let millions of our people be murdered?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN19H10T

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/fearing-u-s-rejection-asylum-seekers-flee-to-canada

You may want to re-read the post there since you seem to be having some trouble understanding the main point.

It is not a matter of ‘better’ or ‘worse’. It is partially a problem of people not making the connection to the atrocities the United States have committed time and time again. Comparing it to a German single incident as opposed to one of the many many US examples is mostly sensationalizing.

The other portion is that people ignore the reality of what did happen to both the Holocaust and what is happening today. It becomes a “hyper exclusive club” of who is treated “badly enough” rather than a specific tragedy that happened to specific peoples. And that is not fair either.

I won’t speak for everyone, but I’ve been making the connections to many, many, many of the atrocities the US has previously committed. But people didn’t listen to me then. The difference is now it is so similar to the preceding events, so horrifyingly similar to pre-Nazi Germany, and this rhetoric is what that finally got white culture to share our plight like a fucking meme. Because it is a history they are very familiar with. Am I happy about it? No. I’m relieved people are finally watching en masse. Do I wish more people knew about US history? Yes. Do I hate having to argue with people daily about what actually happened? Yes. Fix the educational system. In fact, thank you for not stopping at “THEY’RE NOT THE SAME!?!” and going on with “The US actually did way closer”. YES. THEY DID.

THEY DO.

THEY SHOULD NOT.

But not everyone is like that. Now I have to watch hundreds of people getting butthurt that this is the comparison that finally stuck when we shouldn’t be treating this as the main issue. We need to prevent it from getting that bad again. By trying to fight people who are scared instead of acting to prevent it as we are begging you is telling me that you care more about semantics than this potentially happening again. Whether we are comparing it to previous US or non-US historical events.

You aren’t wrong.

But you’re going about it wrong.

First of all, the comparisons are not what got people to finally care. They are just a byproduct of their outrage from caring. People are outraged at what’s happening and they are using the Holocaust as a way to express their outrage. Not the other way around. 

Secondly, the imagery of dead Jewish and Romani people is not “semantics.” This is exactly our complaint. The fact that you can boil it down to that is exactly the problem. 

WE CAN BE OUTRAGED ABOUT WHAT IS HAPPENING AND FIGHT BACK WITHOUT USING DEAD JEWS AND ROMA AS PROPS AND WITHOUT TRAUMATISING OUR COMMUNITIES WITH CONSTANT HITLER IMAGERY

We’re not “going about it wrong,” we’re asking people to respect our dead and recognise that the Holocaust isn’t shorthand for fascism or atrocities. It’s a specific event that traumatised our communities and people need to treat it as such. The fact that it’s everybody’s generic go-to for every situation around the world and that non-Jewish, non-Romani people feel like they have ownership of it when they don’t is a problem, and it has nothing to do with invalidating the horrific things currently being done by ICE. 

If you can’t understand why using our dead as props and acting like “the Holocaust” is interchangeable with the “fascism” then I don’t know what to tell you. 

Nobody is downplaying what’s happening. We just want our dead and our trauma respected. 

And uhhhh literally hitler was greatly inspired by the genocide committed against natives and was very approving of the Long Walk to the Bosque Redondo concentration camp in particular. We don’t need to look to Germany for comparisons. What the American government is doing now is what they’ve been doing to indigenous children and families since their boats first bumped our shores. They did the same thing to my grandpa, they continue to do it to children on reservations. And they’ve drawn invisible borders across the land to separate native families and then use that to further the genocide.

I think it’s lazy to say “people don’t care unless we compare it to the holocaust so let’s keep comparing it to the holocaust even though jewish people are being hurt by it”

When someone says that this isn’t american or a new low point in America, correct them. Don’t let them export the blame to Germany so they don’t have to confront their complicity in the ongoing genocide of indigenous people across all of turtle island.

naamahdarling:

thebibliosphere:

This post brought to you by Rage.

Okay, so a few people commented on the main post with this so I want to address it separately without seeming like I’m dragging individual people over hot coals for a public flogging, but no, an ideal world for me is not one without disabled people in it.

“But that’s not what I said!”

Isn’t it?

“Well why on earth would you want to stay broken?”

I don’t, not really, but also thanks for using language that reminds me you think me and people like me are worthless and deserve to be on the scrap heap of life. Also, not all disabled people consider themselves to be broken, so please don’t say that as a sweeping universal ever the fuck again. I get to make jokes about my broken immune system. But you don’t get to call me that. Okay?

“But that’s not what I’m saying! You’re twisting my words! Stop making me look like a bad person!”

No, that’s not what you’re saying directly, and maybe you don’t mean it or realize where you’re coming from, but the sentiment that the ideal world is one where I don’t exist is not a pleasant one for me. And you can argue with me all you like that I’d still exist I’d just be better, but that doesn’t really help me in this life where such a thing is likely never going to be possible.

So you know what my ideal utopia actually is? The one where I’m included in the narrative.

Inclusiveness is important on so many levels. For one thing it can help normalize the things going on now in our reality, and help change the ill conceived notions that somehow my life is worth less than yours simply because it is different or considered to be more difficult.

Finding a way to specifically write me and people like me out of the narrative because you’ve created an “ideal” world, does not include me, and is inherently ableist by default.

But Joy, in this world there is technology to fix these things, how do I make it more inclusive?

Consider, that all technology has limits. It is always advancing, but it also falls short of being god-mode because it is designed by humans, and humans aren’t God. Contrary to some peoples sense of ego. It is also not always available to everyone who needs it.

Unless your utopia is one where everyone and I do mean Everyone, has the means to access such miraculous technology, it’s not a utopia. It is in fact like our current reality where health care technology is limited by what we currently know about the human body, but also, by who is able to afford it.

There’s people out there with my issues leading an easier life because they have access to the latest treatment and the best doctors. I do not resent them this. But I do resent the system that makes it so that I cannot access these things with ease because of a little thing like money.

So if you have poverty in your fancy sci-fi, that’s an inclusive issue. In fact if you have any sort of power struggle, and of course you do, it’s a sci-fi so there’s going to be some form of societal discourse, then you have opportunities to create wider inclusion in your narrative.

But how do I portray it without sounding like a forced mouthpiece?

Idk fam, it’s your narrative, I can’t do all the thinking for you, but a brief example of how to do this could be:

“Her limbs were older ones, earlier models of the prosthetic implants that had come on the market several eons ago but were still widely in distribution due to their nigh on indestructible nature. But they were heavy, clunky things by modern standards, and even things designed to last would eventually start to wear down. He could see the evidence of where patch jobs has been performed recently, where newer tech had been spliced on to make things a little easier. It was ugly and amateurish, but it worked.”

*

“He looked up at them with his mismatched eyes, the slightly milky blue sheen around the pupils betraying them as clone grown.

“One day they’ll be able to fix that,” he said, smiling ruefully as he guessed the reason for their blatant staring, causing Ash to blush furiously at being caught. They’d thought they’d been more subtle than that. “But till then, it works just fine. Now, what can I do for you?”

My world is a magical one where magic like “cure disease” is a thing, how can I make that more inclusive?

In this instance the same principles apply. Magic will typically be the source of your societal advancements, meaning that magic must also have its limits.

Whether it’s making spells and potions that only work to a certain degree i.e. only recent injuries may be cured/mended instantaneously/fully, or, you can do something else like limit it to the skill of the spell caster.

It may also be restricted on your ability to pay for such skills.

In the case of long term disabilities or issues like auto-immune diseases, you could limit the effectiveness of such potent magical cures, to offering only temporary relief.

There are medications out there that make me, someone with auto-immune issues, feel great for a few days, before the effectiveness wears down. They can also become resistive over time as my body adapts to the use of them. There’s no reason your magical realism can’t include something similar.

So how do I write this without making it look shoehorned in for inclusiveness?

If your main concern is feeling like you’re having to shoehorn in people that actually exist in our very real reality, vs being able to write endlessly about dragons, then I’m going to suggest you need to reevaluate your way of thinking, both on a personal level as well as an authorial one. Because it sounds like you have some issues and biases you need to address when it comes to this. This alone doesn’t make you a terrible person. It makes you ignorant. And ignorance can be remedied by opening up to new ways of thinking and listening to the experiences of others. What makes me question your statement that you’re a “good person” is not your well meaning ignorance, but your continual statement that you’re “not ableist but” and then giving me some paltry reason not to be inclusive in your narrative because it essentially boils down to “your existence ruins my story and actually thinking about this as more than a passing thought is irking. Why are you making this into a thing? No one cares. You got your representation in Game of Thrones that one time, why do I have to think about this. I only want to feel like a nice person, why are you making me uncomfortable, it’s my story, I should be able to do what I want and if you don’t exist that’s my choice”.

Which you’re right. It is your choice and it’s also mine to call your work sub par and mediocre and never buy any of it ever again and give my hard earned money to a better writer who does give a shit.

But as for an example of how to show and not tell with your narrative that doesn’t involve you immediately reevaluating your life and who you are as a person:

“She raised the potion to her lips. It tasted bitter, like sour berries picked before they were ripe. It burned as the magical effects pooled through her body. Anything designed to cure diseases always did at first. There was only so much magic could do for someone like her, but least she could be certain the goblin bite wouldn’t fester into anything worse. She didn’t need rock joint on top of everything else.”

*

“The healer looked down at him from behind their blue silk veil.

“This will hurt,” they said by way of both warning and apology, voice light and soothing, though he couldn’t determine much else about them beyond that as they set their hands on his broken leg.

“And I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do for the missing foot…”

“That’s all right,” Finn said, gritting his teeth as the magic seared through him, burning white-hot until it cooled to a pleasant tingle, like dipping his non-existent toes into clear blue waters. He could almost feel them wriggling as the magic sought to replace something that wasn’t there. “I’ve got an insert for that.”

The healer nodded, looking towards his boots.

“Perhaps we can do something about making you a better one,” they said, continuing to move their hands up the length of his thigh until the glow of magic around their hands dimmed and they gave him a reassuring pat on the leg before reaching for his boot and the weighted insert inside the toe.

“These soles have seen better days. I dare say that’s the reason you slipped in the first place.”

*

“The magical limb glowed faintly in the darkness. Which would have been fine, were they not a thief.

Mal paused before moving any further through the darkened house, pulling out a thick dark glove from their doublet and pulling it on. The magical was still somewhat visible undearneath, but at least it no longer looked like a disembodied magical hand floating through the darkness.

They could, of course, have extinguished the magic. But it was never worth the trouble of finding a mage to ignite it again. And besides, two hands could carry more than one.”

So you see, it’s not impossible to include disability and disability aids into your fantastical narratives. It is also entirely possible to make it witty, funny and poignant, as well as something you only ever mention in casual passing to remind the reader hey, Character McNoLegs uses a floating wheelchair, so they’re going to stay behind in this instance and be the getaway driver, because scaling the tower that doesn’t have a ramp isn’t exactly in their wheelhouse of strengths right now. This does not however make them redundant to the narrative, nor does it make them a burden.

It just requires a little creative thought on your part, which happily should be in your wheelhouse of strengths as an author.

Supposedly.

And if this seems snarkier than my usual replies, I’d apologize, but I literally, figuratively and spiritually do not give a fuck. The giveafuck well has run dry, you’ve caused a drought of fucks in my general vicinity. Fucks are rationed until such a time people stop crawling out the woodwork to tell me they’re not ableist but, and then saying something horifically ableist.

Here’s a thought, all that time and energy you’re putting into giving me reasons before 9am as to why, in an ideal world, I wouldn’t exist, and bending arse over backwards to justify your reasoning reasoning when you could just as easily put that same energy into not being a) ableist and b) a lackluster mediocre hack spending their time reminding me you wish I didn’t exist, but hey, you do you.

I’ll be right over here. Far the fuck away from you and enjoying the use of the block button.

Now if you’ll excuse me. I’m going back to fucking bed.

I once had a fairly popular (and very skilled and thoughtful) writer tell me that the absence of people like me – people with mental illness – as well as other forms of disability was because such “problems” had been solved a long time ago.  High-tech medicine made possible what the social model of disability alone could not eliminate, so either disabilities were no longer really disabling because the people were adequately accommodated (good!) or they had simply been … bred out (not good! AT ALL!),

They didn’t seem to understand why I found a world literally without people like me in it sinister in a very visceral way.  They saw the loss of people like me as a net good, as part of what it would take to make a truly healthy society.

Do I want people to have to go through what I went through? No! But does leaving people like me out of narratives actually help that to happen? No!  It allows us to be slotted neatly into a “problem” that was “solved”.  Really, it was a narrative “problem” the author chose to “solve” by eliminating folks like me instead of envisioning ways in which the literal inevitability of the existence of mental illness could be addressed in ways that were not terrifically ableist.

I pointed out that such a world would have required a sweeping act of eugenics to achieve, and that whether it was accomplished “humanely” (by selecting only “defect-free” embryos) or not, readers like me aren’t going to be charmed by your fantasy world if it involves the fantasy of us not being there. They responded by saying their alien culture did have morally gray underpinnings, that to get where they were things weren’t nice for a while, and you know, I would have bought it if it had ever been interrogated within the material itself, but it never was.  The vividly-realized culture was almost exclusively depicted as one where people lived in harmony and with purpose, the needs of all fulfilled by all.  It was very utopian and attractive and I was on board with it right up until a clearly mentally ill character was forcibly removed for correction.  Not treatment, not really, but correction.  It was specifically framed in that way.  As if it was an act of willful noncompliance to be mentally ill.  And I swear I had a full-body nope reaction to it.  The author wasn’t interested in having the problems with this explained to them.  It was a non-issue to them, completely.

While I do think their work is incredibly imaginative and brilliant in a lot of ways, I took down my positive reviews and unsubscribed from everything.  If you can’t be brilliant enough to envision ways to help people like me instead of eliminating them, I don’t need you.  If you give me no other way to see myself in your narrative besides “suboptimal, deselected for breeding, flaw eliminated” and then decide not to address the moral ramifications of that, like, ever, I’m not going to keep paying you. I do not want to read about a world you paint as better than ours in almost every single imaginable way, a world I would actually really really enjoy living in, where people like me were deleted.

You don’t get to paint people like me as problems to be solved just because your vision of a perfect world doesn’t include us, and then tell us that it was all for the best, really, because people in your ideal world wouldn’t have to suffer like I have.

Write for the disabled audience you have, or you are writing for the people who want us gone.

socialistexan:

pettygraham:

queeranarchism:

zvaigzdelasas:

violaslayvis:

I think finding out that Hitler was inspired by how throughly Andrew Jackson committed genocide against the Natives would shatter or at least destabilize the ethos of the Founding Fathers & America for a lot of people

also the american eugenics movement which started in the late 1800′s was a huge inspiration for Hitler, and was even where the idea of blonde hair blue eyed superiority came from, and the idea of a “gas chamber” to take care of “undesirables”. In the early part of the third reich, the american eugenics movement saw it as the logical conclusion of their ““research”” and republished lots and lots of nazi propaganda 

but yeah, nazism is so un-american uwu 

Hitler praised American immigration restrictions in Mein Kampf. When the nazis wrote the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime, they specifically modelled them after the Jim Crow Laws,

the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law of the United States.  

Big chunks of the American legal system and history inspired the nazi’s in their organisation of the Holocaust. 

Welp

Just to bring this into a modern context:

“After Trump’s election, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Trump adviser, compared Trump favorably with Jackson. “This is like Andrew Jackson’s victory,” Giuliani said. “This is the people beating the establishment. And that’s how he (Donald Trump) posited right from the beginning”

Trump hung up a portrait of Jackson when he got into office and calls Jackson his hero and sleeps with a copy of Hitler’s speeches next to his bed.

This is why the “American Tradtionalist” loves him so much. Trump is America, and that’s not a good thing.

neurodivergent-crow:

transmortified:

metapianycist:

reproductive rights issues:

  • abortion
  • birth control

also reproductive rights issues:

  • doctors performing c sections during births without informed consent
  • eugenics via sterilization requirements for trans people to change documentation
  • eugenics via forced/nonconsenting sterilization of disabled people
  • eugenics via forced/nonconsenting sterilization of people of color
  • eugenics via selective abortion of disabled fetuses (fetuses with Down syndrome especially) (these are abortions sought by people who WANT to be pregnant–but only with non-disabled children, when there’s absolutely no guarantee that a non-disabled child won’t become disabled)

if your reproductive rights activism doesn’t incorporate ALL OF THE ABOVE, i want no part of it.

also 

– doctors deliberately stitching their female patients genitals tighter than necessary / than is safe to “make sex more enjoyable for their spouse”

– doctors refusing to perform sterilization on people because “they’ll change their minds and want children down the road”

THIS THIS THIS

pettygraham:

queeranarchism:

zvaigzdelasas:

violaslayvis:

I think finding out that Hitler was inspired by how throughly Andrew Jackson committed genocide against the Natives would shatter or at least destabilize the ethos of the Founding Fathers & America for a lot of people

also the american eugenics movement which started in the late 1800′s was a huge inspiration for Hitler, and was even where the idea of blonde hair blue eyed superiority came from, and the idea of a “gas chamber” to take care of “undesirables”. In the early part of the third reich, the american eugenics movement saw it as the logical conclusion of their ““research”” and republished lots and lots of nazi propaganda 

but yeah, nazism is so un-american uwu 

Hitler praised American immigration restrictions in Mein Kampf. When the nazis wrote the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime, they specifically modelled them after the Jim Crow Laws,

the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law of the United States.  

Big chunks of the American legal system and history inspired the nazi’s in their organisation of the Holocaust. 

Welp

The Nazi racial purity laws forbade the intermarriage of “pure” Aryans (Germans) with “inferior” races (read Jews and Gypsies). Moreover, they made laws allowing for the sterilization of “unfit parents,” and the “euthanizing” of “unfit” children. Horrific laws indeed, and, yes, the ideology was drawn straight from Adolph Hitler’s prison diatribe “Mein Kampf.” But when the German government — the legally constituted German government — wanted the wording for these laws, where did it turn? To Mein Kampf? No, the preponderance of evidence indicates that the Nazi government turned to the laws of Virginia.

Also: Ten years after Virginia passed its 1924 sterilisation act, Joseph Dejarnette, superintendent of Virginia’s Western State Hospital, complained in the Richmond Times-Dispatch: “The Germans are beating us at our own game.”

Seems like your answer to my previous ask is rather pro-life i.e. “all pregnancies should be carried to term regardless of the consequences or the quality of the life resulting from said pregnancy”. I’ve never been able to wrap my head around that kind of logic, it seems the mainstay of neocons everywhere. Maybe medical school has indoctrinated me to care more about quality of life and health than about abstract notions of the worth of unborn individuals. Who can say :/

natalunasans:

appalachian-ace:

metapianycist:

livingdeadwitch:

metapianycist:

why on this earth would you come to the askbox of a multiply disabled person and expect them to respond kindly to your insinuating “y’know since disability makes life harder, wouldn’t it be better if no disabled fetuses were ever born”

note: for people just tuning in, this is in reference to my recent post about selective abortion of disabled fetuses where i goddamn literally say that i don’t support restricting abortion or shaming people who selectively terminate?? because it’s not about individuals??

“why on this earth would you come to the askbox of a multiply disabled person and expect them to respond kindly to your insinuating ‘y’know since disability makes life harder, wouldn’t it be better if no disabled fetuses were ever born’?”

because that’s what being in medical school does to you. i both cringed and laughed at the asker’s use of “indoctrinated” because yeah, the medical-industrial complex, including medical school, does indoctrinate people with ableist ideas of “quality of life” that lead them to conclude that it would be better if disabled people were never born.

i was in a graduate program with med and dental students. i had to take an ethics class with them. it seemed like they didn’t think of disabled people as human; i mean, i had one classmate compare the names for inanimate objects to disabled people’s diagnoses when i said that id/dd/ld people reject the r-slur. dude literally thought that disabled people have the same right to self-identify as an inanimate object. one of the issues we talked about in that class was selective abortion. long story short, i almost flipped a table, and probably would have had the prof not interceded.

i love how this doctor jokes about it as if their medical education was entirely bare facts outside of any paradigm. I’m 100% certain that opinions like “disabled fetuses are better off not being born” are presented (or understood) in medical education as indisputable medical facts.

no doctor likes to think they could be wrong about a belief so central to the paradigm in which they were educated 🙃

I’ve had too many doctors tell me or my loved ones that we’re just faking our medical problems for me to think that medical education isn’t full of intense ableism.

I did a research paper on Deaf culture in high school and one of the stories I found was that a Deaf woman who had to change doctors after the first visit with an unplanned but wanted pregnancy – after years of going to him for pelvic exams, apparently – because he would only agree to schedule an abortion, refused to offer any prenatal care, and kept going on about how she wouldn’t want to bring someone else like her into the world, now would she.

He was so caught up in his own ideas about disability and what lives are worth living and what lives are worth permitting to exist that he wouldn’t shut up and let her communicate for the one minute it should have taken to get it into his over-credentialed head that her hearing loss had been completely accidental with no even faintly plausible genetic component. Her baby had no risk factors.

Because he was the doctor and he had a medical degree and she needed to calmly accept his words about the good of the future of mankind (while not permitted to flip out about the discovery she’d been getting pelvic exams from a doctor who saw her fertility as a negative trait) and get an abortion appointment set up without pausing to consult with or notify her own husband and co-parent-to-be.

Her baby was born with the expected lack of hearing problems.

even if her baby had had risk factors wtf would be wrong with Deaf people wanting Deaf kids?! (if you were studying Deaf culture, this question is probably not even directed at you, it is more rhetorical)

Seems like your answer to my previous ask is rather pro-life i.e. “all pregnancies should be carried to term regardless of the consequences or the quality of the life resulting from said pregnancy”. I’ve never been able to wrap my head around that kind of logic, it seems the mainstay of neocons everywhere. Maybe medical school has indoctrinated me to care more about quality of life and health than about abstract notions of the worth of unborn individuals. Who can say :/

appalachian-ace:

metapianycist:

livingdeadwitch:

metapianycist:

why on this earth would you come to the askbox of a multiply disabled person and expect them to respond kindly to your insinuating “y’know since disability makes life harder, wouldn’t it be better if no disabled fetuses were ever born”

note: for people just tuning in, this is in reference to my recent post about selective abortion of disabled fetuses where i goddamn literally say that i don’t support restricting abortion or shaming people who selectively terminate?? because it’s not about individuals??

“why on this earth would you come to the askbox of a multiply disabled person and expect them to respond kindly to your insinuating ‘y’know since disability makes life harder, wouldn’t it be better if no disabled fetuses were ever born’?”

because that’s what being in medical school does to you. i both cringed and laughed at the asker’s use of “indoctrinated” because yeah, the medical-industrial complex, including medical school, does indoctrinate people with ableist ideas of “quality of life” that lead them to conclude that it would be better if disabled people were never born.

i was in a graduate program with med and dental students. i had to take an ethics class with them. it seemed like they didn’t think of disabled people as human; i mean, i had one classmate compare the names for inanimate objects to disabled people’s diagnoses when i said that id/dd/ld people reject the r-slur. dude literally thought that disabled people have the same right to self-identify as an inanimate object. one of the issues we talked about in that class was selective abortion. long story short, i almost flipped a table, and probably would have had the prof not interceded.

i love how this doctor jokes about it as if their medical education was entirely bare facts outside of any paradigm. I’m 100% certain that opinions like “disabled fetuses are better off not being born” are presented (or understood) in medical education as indisputable medical facts.

no doctor likes to think they could be wrong about a belief so central to the paradigm in which they were educated 🙃

I’ve had too many doctors tell me or my loved ones that we’re just faking our medical problems for me to think that medical education isn’t full of intense ableism.

I did a research paper on Deaf culture in high school and one of the stories I found was that a Deaf woman who had to change doctors after the first visit with an unplanned but wanted pregnancy – after years of going to him for pelvic exams, apparently – because he would only agree to schedule an abortion, refused to offer any prenatal care, and kept going on about how she wouldn’t want to bring someone else like her into the world, now would she.

He was so caught up in his own ideas about disability and what lives are worth living and what lives are worth permitting to exist that he wouldn’t shut up and let her communicate for the one minute it should have taken to get it into his over-credentialed head that her hearing loss had been completely accidental with no even faintly plausible genetic component. Her baby had no risk factors.

Because he was the doctor and he had a medical degree and she needed to calmly accept his words about the good of the future of mankind (while not permitted to flip out about the discovery she’d been getting pelvic exams from a doctor who saw her fertility as a negative trait) and get an abortion appointment set up without pausing to consult with or notify her own husband and co-parent-to-be.

Her baby was born with the expected lack of hearing problems.

President Signs Executive Order Mandating That Poor People Work or Lose ‘Welfare’

note-a-bear:

spooniestrong:

lemmy:

progenyofworms:

thefingerfuckingfemalefury:

goluxexmachina:

dr-archeville:

Without much fanfare (totally apropos, given what’s been happening in the world of the White House in the last 72 hours),
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday that will
force recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits,
Medicaid and low-income housing subsidies to find work or lose their
assistance.

Trump quietly signed the long-anticipated order, oddly named
“Reducing Poverty in America by Promoting Opportunity and Economic
Mobility.” Given that many government agencies, including the Department
of Health and Human Services, have already begun issuing waivers to
Republican governors who want to impose stricter work requirements on
Medicaid recipients to cut costs, it will not make much of an impact, according to the New York Times.

The
fact remains that most able-bodied adults who receive federal aid in
the form of subsidized health care or housing already work—but are still
unable to make ends meet; others receive exemptions for legitimate
reasons.

From the Times:

The order gave
all cabinet departments 90 days to produce plans that impose work
requirements on able-bodied aid recipients and block ineligible
immigrants from receiving aid, while drafting “a list of recommended
regulatory and policy changes” to push recipients off the rolls and into
jobs.

…

The aim, Trump aides said … is to prod federal
and state officials to take a tougher stance with aid recipients —
millions of whom currently receive exemptions from existing work
requirements because they are in training programs, provide care for
relatives or volunteer their labor.

The Agriculture Department is
already pressuring states to impose work requirements in the
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the program formerly known as
food stamps. Earlier this year, the Department of Health and Human
Services granted a waiver to Arkansas
so it could require Medicaid recipients to get jobs, participate in job
training or engage in job searches at least 80 hours a month.

According
to the Kaiser Foundation, most able-bodied adults who do not already
have jobs face obstacles in working, including mental problems, criminal
records and certain family situations.

Yet the narrative from the Trump administration says differently.

“Our
country suffers from nearly record high welfare enrollments,” said
Andrew Bremberg, the president’s domestic policy chief, according to the
Times, which notes that Temporary Assistance for Needy Families
payments to poor people are approaching record lows.

Trump also
reportedly wants to change the word “welfare” to include not only cash
payments  but also food and medical benefits (SNAP and Medicaid).

Or
he just doesn’t give AF. And I quote: “Mr. Trump, several aides said,
is unconcerned—or perhaps even unaware—of the distinction between cash
assistance and other safety-net programs … he calls them all welfare.”

And we know what connotations go along with that.

FFFUUUCCCKKK

Goddammit.

To all the people this bullshit is going to harm and make life even more awful/difficult for: remember that the Republicans are the ones responsible for this shit during the midterm elections this year

AND VOTE THESE HATEFUL SACKS OF SHIT OUT

This is how they kill poor people, slowly and legally

My dad will lose both his home and food stamps from this.

This is murder.

By any other name.

MURDER.

This was done in the UK a few years ago. Within months hundreds were facing an abrupt cessation of benefits. Hundreds more were looking at the same, if somewhat delayed–talking shrunk but not cut benefits, diminished access to services, disability insensitive labor requirements….

Almost all of it landed first, and potentially most harshly, on disabled people. While this will undoubtedly harm people who aren’t disabled, but are otherwise limited in work opportunities (single parents, caretakers, employment deserts, etc), make no mistake that it will be disabled people bearing the brunt of this.

President Signs Executive Order Mandating That Poor People Work or Lose ‘Welfare’