CNN interviews athlete and actress Aimee Mullins, a double amputee who has set world records using prosthetic devices. An excerpt:

[Mullins] believes that people are not born disabled. “It’s society that disables an individual by not investing in enough creativity to allow for someone to show us the quality that makes them rare and valuable and capable.”

The interview links to video of a speech Mullins gave before a medical audience last year in San Diego, in which she underscored the negative connotations of the term “disabled.” In the CNN interview, Mullins was asked about the significance of language in defining possibilities for people with disabilities. Her response:

It’s not so much the word itself. The idea of being politically correct is not the goal here. It’s how we use the word very casually as a label to try to encompass somebody’s value to our community and the worth of their contribution to our community. That’s what we need to get right.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at 1:47 pm and is filed under NOT2BEMISSED, language, limb loss, public attitudes. 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.