Tag: eugenics

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It’s Exhausting to Constantly be Told Your Life is Worth Less Than Others

White person with blonde hair in a red hoodie which is pulled right up over their face

Trigger warning: Disabled deaths as a result of COVID-19

It’s hard to be told that your life is worth less than others; it’s even harder to have it repeated across social media, videos, posts, D.M.s, comments, political and medical coverage, and casual chats.

It’s overwhelming, unrelenting, dehumanising.

Consider a world in which the statement: I deserve to live, even if it slightly impinges on your life, is a radical act – a radical suggestion. You’re already living in it. It’s not a hypothetical scenario. You live a somewhat gilded existence if you don’t see its structures or feel its effects.

Disabled people live in unadorned cages.   

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Abortion is a Disability Rights Issue – and Not Just Because of Eugenics

A yellow sign on the floor "You always have a choice" with a pair of shoes visible in the bottom of the shot

TW: Abortion, eugenics, sexual assault/rape.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last week or so, you’ll have heard about Texas’s bill banning abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy – before most people even know they’re pregnant. If you don’t live on Twitter, though, you may have missed eugenics creeping into the debate.

A tweet from Richard Hanania of the Centre for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology points out that you generally can’t screen for Down’s syndrome before about week 10 (the NHS says you can screen for it and Edwards’ and Patau’s syndrome between weeks 10 and 14), and that lots of those who find out their child may have Down’s choose not to continue with their pregnancies. 

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No Spectrum 10k, Autistic People Don’t Want to Know the Cause and We Don’t Need to be Cured

A white woman with brown curly hair looking at her reflection in the mirror and smiling

Trigger warning – This article discusses eugenics in relation to finding a “cure” for ableism.

This week, we saw the launch of Spectrum 10K – a project aiming to gain DNA samples from 10,000 autistic people and their families to examine our genetics, to see how our experiences “shape our wellbeing”. It aims to be the largest study done, but after its launch by celebrities such as Paddy McGuiness in the media completely uncriticised, it has quickly raised alarm bells across the autistic community. 

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