By Anthony Kuhn on National Public Radio:

Organizers of this year’s Paralympics in Beijing have promised that the games will celebrate humanitarian spirit and inclusive attitudes toward people with physical disabilities. But advocates in China say the society’s prejudice toward those with disabilities goes very deep, and change will come slowly if at all.

The founder of a school for people with intellectual disabilities said China must recognize that people with disabilities need equal rights, not charity. “People don’t see this from the angle of human rights — the right to survive, to be educated, to be employed,” she said. “It’s as if we can help these people if we have money, but if we do not, then we don’t have to.”

Christine Rosen, writing in the Wall Street Journal, memorializes Harriet McBryde Johnson as someone who made society look at disability as a natural part of the human experience. Johnson, she says, demonstrated that disability transcends the convenient categories that often stymie political discourse: secular or religious, liberal or conservative. Johnson held up a mirror to a society whose acceptance of disability wanes as its scientific powers to eliminate disability grow.

As an example, Rosen cites the “rapid near-disappearance of people with Down syndrome.”

As a culture, we have made what Amy Laura Hall of Duke University Divinity School calls a “democratic calculus of worth” regarding Down Syndrome. And that calculus has resulted in a society hostile to people who refuse to make the culturally acceptable choice of ridding themselves of a disabled child before she is born.

… if choice and prevention produce a culture that equates disability with irresponsible parenting decisions, then the homage we pay to accommodation will prove hollow indeed. And as the population ages, and more Americans find themselves living with disabilities, questions about worth at the end of life will become even more pressing. Thanks to people such as Harriet Johnson, we have not yet reached the point where accommodation has given way to neglect or elimination. But we would do well to respect what Ms. Johnson’s own life so ably demonstrated: People with disabilities, she said, “have something the world needs.”

Christine Rosen is senior editor of The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology & Society, and the author of Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement.

Boston Globe columnist Beverly Beckham again chronicles the life of her little granddaughter Lucy, who has Down syndrome. Beckham takes Lucy for a regular cardiology checkup. “Sweet, curious and brave,” Lucy stays still for an EKG and an echocardiogram.

She is all guts and grace, this little girl who, until about 20 years ago, most doctors and books dismissed as a child unable to understand anything, not worth the bother of loving and teaching and raising.

It kills me to think of children like Lucy whom our society wrote off for years, who were warehoused on the advice of experts, who were abandoned and then ignored. It kills me to think of experts today advising women to abort children like Lucy.

She runs down the hall when the tests are finished, laughing as I chase her. It is one hour and eight minutes later, a long, long time for a little kid to be quiet and patient and good. Dr. Geggel is pleased with Lucy’s test results. But like the rest of us who love Lucy, he is equally pleased with Lucy herself.

Earlier columns by Beverly Beckham are here.

(Boston Globe photo)

By Manuel Roig-Franzia in the Washington Post:

To prepare for her latest production, Peruvian prima ballerina Rossana Peñaloza chose to spend six months using a wheelchair in Mexico City, where streets lack wheelchair access and drivers don’t yield for wheelchairs.

After years of catching bouquets and taking bows, she suddenly was “the other,” a freak, an annoyance and, maybe worst of all, an object of pity. She cried every day. And she was furious.

Peñaloza performs her new one-woman show in a wheelchair, challenging perceptions of people with disabilities in a country where they frequently live cloistered lives because of social stigma. The performance in Mexico City has “shocked and shamed Mexico,” Roig-Franzia writes.

In an interview, Peñaloza said Mexican schools too often segregate students with disabilities. “My work is a grain of sand in an oyster so that all this will change,” she said.

Readers commenting on the story complained about the Post’s use of outdated terms like “confined to a wheelchair” and “the disabled.”

Drew national attention for her opposition to ‘the charity mentality.’

From the Charleston [S.C.] Post and Courier:

Harriet McBryde Johnson, a tenacious, well-known Charleston disability and civil rights attorney, died suddenly Wednesday. She was 50.

South Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Jean Toal said Johnson was a fierce advocate for the disabled, a nationally revered attorney and a titanic figure in state legal history.

Johnson was perhaps best known for her 2003 New York Times Magazine cover story “Unspeakable Truths.” The first-person piece described her journey to Princeton University to debate ethicist Peter Singer over his advocacy for the legalization of selective infanticide of children with disabilities. The cover of the magazine carried a photo of Johnson in her power wheelchair with the headline “Should I have been killed at birth?”

He insists he doesn’t want to kill me. He simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was, and to let other parents kill similar babies as they come along and thereby avoid the suffering that comes with lives like mine and satisfy the reasonable preferences of parents for a different kind of child. It has nothing to do with me. I should not feel threatened.

Whenever I try to wrap my head around his tight string of syllogisms, my brain gets so fried it’s . . . almost fun. Mercy! It’s like ”Alice in Wonderland.”

Johnson also drew national attention for her opposition to “the charity mentality” and “pity-based tactics” of the annual Lewis muscular dystrophy telethon. She protested the telethon for nearly 20 years.

She was the author of the unconventional memoir Too Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a Life, a wry exploration of her life in “Cripworld,” and the young adult novel Accidents of Nature, about teens at a summer camp for children with disabilities in the 1970s.

Johnson, who had a congenital neuromuscular disorder, ran a solo law practice in Charleston.

News and Courier profile of Harriet McBryde Johnson is here.

Profile from New Mobility is here.

Late addition: June 7, 2008, obituary from the New York Times is here.

Writing in the [UK] Independent, columnist Dominic Lawson says current British abortion law contains remnants of eugenic prejudice against people with disabilities. The Human Fertilization and Embryology Act specifies that abortions of “seriously handicapped” fetuses (the term is not defined) may be performed at any time up until birth, whereas fetuses without disabilities may only be aborted up to 24 weeks gestation.

A proposed amendment to the law, which would have provided expectant mothers with up-to-date information and referrals when disability is diagnosed prenatally, was conclusively defeated last week.

And there you have it: such rights as are imputed to all “viable” unborn children are absolutely withdrawn if the child is not … normal.

… Not only did the great majority support the notion that a disabled unborn child could be terminated right up until 40 weeks’ gestation, they didn’t even want there to be a legal requirement that such a decision is based on more than an understandable spasm of panic, or even horror.

(more…)

From the Toronto Star:

Toronto’s Don McKellar is interviewed in Cannes, France, about his upcoming film, which depicts the panic and violence that follows an unexplained epidemic of blindness. The film, starring Jualianne Moore, was chosen to open the Cannes Film Festival this week and will also compete for the coveted Palme d’Or.

McKellar is hoping viewers will recognize Blindness as a film that deals in bigger ideas than just terrifying people.

“We shouldn’t be scared of blind people. They’re not monsters. To me, humanity is exposed when people are blind; they’re not dehumanized.”

McKellar’s previous high-profile film about global calamity was Last Night, his directorial feature debut a decade ago about the end of the world.

Earlier post, with video, here.