A life of quality

From Lawrence Downes in the New York Times, a piece about Harriet McBryde Johnson, lawyer and defender of the rights of people with disabilities.

What she saw was a world that refused to make room for the severely disabled, one that looked at people like her — if it looked at them at all — with horror, hostility, condescension and pity, a sentiment she hated.

… Ms. Johnson, an atheist, was unmoved by religious appeals to life’s sanctity. Instead, her rebuttal boiled down to a simple: How dare you? How dare you decide that certain people with limitations are nonpersons with no right to exist? How dare you presume to define “quality of life,” for me or anyone else, to set the value of a disabled life lower than yours, or to conclude that such a life lacks the potential for happiness and dignity because you cannot imagine how it could?

The disabled certainly suffer. But everyone does, Ms. Johnson argued, and if the disabled face extra hassles and indignities in life, well, remedies for those things are all possible, and should be provided. Instead, the world is run by and for the nondisabled, and those who don’t measure up are infantilized, ignored and stockpiled in institutions that Ms. Johnson called “the disability gulag.” She feared being sent to it in her later years.

Ms. Johnson was enraged by injustice, but not susceptible to hatred or despair. To her, [philosopher Peter] Singer was a monster, but she realized that the unenlightened also included many of her own friends, colleagues and relatives. She decided that “it’s not in my heart to deny every single one of them, categorically, my affection and my love.”

Ms. Johnson died this week at the age of 50. See earlier post here.

Lawrence Downes is a member of the New York Times editorial board.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 12th, 2008 at 3:49 pm and is filed under NOT2BEMISSED, law, obits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  Email This Post