communities when an accessibility framework is lacking in choosing locations for meetings, meetings lack services to make them accessible for those who are hard of hearing or deaf, or other obstacles arise because activists are too used to speaking for communities instead of listening to them.
It’s uncomfortable and sometimes enraging to consider a dialogue with the pro-life movement, but without it, they will be able to continue the wholesale appropriation of a disability rights framework for a movement that ultimately betrays everyone. No one in reproductive justice should want to identify as a eugenicist, not just because it is a fake label the pro-life movement uses on people who advocate for abortion rights. They should want to avoid eugenicist rhetoric because it can ultimately only serve to undermine the work of reproductive justice.
When the pro-life movement brings up the women who abort fetuses with Down syndrome diagnoses, reproductive justice advocates need a better response than ignoring it. The conversation needs to be centered on resources, on support, and on countering ableist narratives. When they frame these statistics as proof of eugenics, as proof that the abortion rights movement doesn’t care about people with disabilities, reproductive justice feminists must be ready to frame disability not just in terms of children and fetuses but also in terms of adults with disabilities. The conversation about the right to choose should explicitly include that right for people with disabilities. It has to talk about the infrastructure and the access that they might need. It has to talk about the rights of people with disabilities to control their own fertility and sexuality.
When mainstream feminists don’t talk about the infrastructure that contributes to people aborting fetuses with disabilities, it leaves a ready-made space for those who would infringe on the right to choose. Like other people who have abortions, those who choose to abort fetuses with congenital abnormalities most likely do so because they already have children they’re providing for, they live in poverty, and/or they experience other structural oppression that prevents them from being able to commit to caring for a child with a disability. It is important for reproductive rights and reproductive justice frameworks to recognize that the choice to carry to term or to abort is heavily influenced by class, race, and other obstacles created by marginalization. Parents with disabilities are stigmatized as being unable to appropriately care for their children no matter how many successfully raise families. Some people with disabilities are at risk of being sterilized as a result of that stigma. Others were sterilized without consent based on the idea that they would have children with disabilities and thus create an intergenerational cycle of dependency on the minimal resources available.
In general, having children is expensive, and the lack of substantial social safety in the United States makes it even more difficult for low-income parents already struggling to afford the basics of housing, childcare, and medical care. Children with disabilities may require expensive specialized health care, educational support, a specialized diet, and therapy, and reproductive justice has to address what happens after a child is born. By and large, parents can’t afford to not work outside the home, which means that they must pay for childcare or attempt to cobble together some form of at-home care with opposite work schedules. There is a devastating choice on the table: a lack of family time and caregiver support or a substantial loss of income. Because institutions are not designed to help parents raise high-needs children, it becomes much easier to argue that children with disabilities are a burden to be avoided instead of addressing the paucity of resources.
Sympathy also bleeds away for parents of children with disabilities and parents with disabilities, particularly when those parents are of color, are LGBTQIA, or are anything outside the expected “traditional” middle-class, able-bodied, cis, white family dynamic. Their disability, race, immigration status, gender identity, sexual orientation, or income level becomes the center of a debate over their right to have a family instead of plans to support those families. Because like race, disability has long been an excuse for the medical establishment to forcibly sterilize people, and any concept of reproductive justice must include an understanding of that history.
And a true reproductive justice framework has to challenge the rights of guardians of people with disabilities to request, without their consent, sterilization of those who depend on them. As Human