Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

The Perfect Baby

Testing of the foetus to determine health

3 perspectives

1. parents who continue with the pregnancy

2. parents who terminate

3. parents who don’t know what to do

Intellectual Disabilities

Doesn’t include differences that are strictly physical

Characterised by limited mental capacity and difficulty with adaptive behaviours

Affects: intellectual functioning, mental capacity, adaptive behaviours

Developmental Disabilities

Umbrella term that includes intellectual disabilities + other disabilities present during the developmental stages 

Affects: intellectual and cognitive ability, physical functioning, or both

“A Good Life”

 food, love, safety, meaning, safety, autonomy, recognition of worth

→ suffering is commonly quoted in the definition of a good life

Positive Eugenics: “More of the human beings that we want”

• Encouraging strong, smart, attractive, successful people to reproduce

• Baby Bonus in Canada

• IT companies pay their top female employees to free their eggs so that they don’t go bad

Negative Eugenics: “Less of the human beings we don't want”

• Sterilisation during other procedures

  • Focus on mental health, minority ethnic groups, immigrants

• Banning immigration

• Physical isolation of men and women in institutions 

• Nazism

Neo eugenics

• choice to terminate rhetoric 

  • Prenatal testing, pregnancy screenings

  • Emphasis on risk of pregnancy

  • Forces parents to listen to their doctor or do their own research

History of Eugenics

• Nomadic people left weak and injured members left the weak and injured members behind to save resources

• Religious ties (curse from the Gods, sins)

  • Palliative care (asylums, hospitals, orphanages)

• “Eugenics is the science of improving stock” -- Francis Galton

• Charles Darwin and survival of the fittest

CRISPR: gene editing

 can cut out parts of genomes to change mutations of diseases and cells

allowing someone to pick and choose what they want in offspring

need rules so people aren’t seen as having “undesirable” phenotypes and genes

Inspiration Porn (Stella Young’s 2014 TEDTalk)

• Using disabled people doing mundane tasks as inspiration (wow! She’s so inspiring because she bought groceries while using a wheelchair)

• Puts able-bodied people’s worries into perspective 

  • “If they can do it despite this awful thing happening to them, I should not be sad”

“The Only Disability in Life is a Bad Attitude” (Burt and Lite)

• If you stare at a staircase long enough with a smile, it’ll turn into a ramp

• Unintended negative consequences

  • Misrepresents the lives of people with disabilities

  • Enforces the individual model (YOU can overcome it, it’s not a systemic issue)

• Justifies the system in place that oppresses disabled people

• Need to showcase the person. Not their disability.

Abled-disabled divide

Able bodied: Normal, personal agency, employable

Disabled people: voiceless and powerless, dependent