CW: Eugenics

While it’s important to make young people aware COVID will affect them even without underlying issues, I’m disturbed by the # of pieces mourning young and healthy folks. I’m not seeing a similar trend of pieces mourning disabled folks. And that shapes who we value. https://twitter.com/nhsmillion/status/1243104169961181185

It also is a manifestation of pre-existing ideas of who is valuable. Young and abled people have ‘potential’ and therefore deserve to live. But that idea of potential is bound up in their ability to ‘contribute’ to society through capitalist productivity, the belief...

That their bodies are not burdens, and the idea that they have a higher potential for future well being than disabled people. We see young abled people as potential or current parents. As generative. As able to live full & happy lives. We do not see disabled potential in this way

Disabled people are often seen as expensive drains on our system. We don’t see them as contributors to society - only as takers or burdens. We don’t believe disabled people experience well being. Or have the potential to live happy and generative and full lives. Or to parent.

Disabled people tell us this isn’t true and we think they’re liars. I just finished the book The Minority Body by Barnes and it’s several hundred pages in length and written to try to convince philosophers to actually believe disabled people when they say they like being disabled

And philosophers are leading bioethics discussions for the medical community! How do you prioritize disabled lives when you’ve been trained to believe they aren’t worth living and that anyone who says they are is essentially committing a logical fallacy!

I’m currently reading Judith Butler’s Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? and while she is writing to a very different context, some of what she is saying about ungrievable lives applies to disabled people.

“UnGrievable Lives are those that cannot be lost, that cannot be destroyed, because they already inhabit a lost and destroyed zone, they are, ontologically, and from the start, already lost and destroyed,” says Butler.

Butler talks about how communication devices and the media frames these lives and the lives of others and how these frames are used to cultivate and maintain cultural assent to kill others. We have been doing this with disabled people since the beginning of this crisis and before

A doctors at NHS pressured all his disabled patients to sign DNR orders. We are talking about taking vents away from uninflected disabled people (and therefore killing them) because those vents will save more people and will save more ‘valuable’ people. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-wales-52117814

Even the way aid is being doled out by governments is a form of eugenics as a friend pointed out last night. We are giving abled people far more than we have ever given disabled people and we are not topping disabled people up to cover additional expenses during the pandemic.

That could kill disabled people who can’t buy extra supplies. The low rates of assistance HAS killed many disabled people in the past either through neglect or suicide. But we don’t think disability rates are high enough for abled/working people.Because their lives are Grievable

My point is that we need to pay close attention to all the ways we are rhetorically constructing disabled deaths as meaningless because we already see them as lost and therefore not worthy of grief. These stories about healthy people dying seem benign. But they aren’t.

They’re just another way that we are constructing and delimiting who matters. Whose death is and isn’t a tragedy and by doing so deciding how disabled people will be treated in a pandemic.