Difference or Disability?
By Laura Hercher,
The Beagle Has Landed
| 10. 27. 2020
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson discusses disability as an identity and the conflicts raised by genetic testing and counseling on Laura Hercher's podcast, The Beagle Has Landed.
Chapters:
3:00 “I didn’t understand myself as a disabled person because there was no identity group to belong to before about 1980.” Rosemarie explains how our current understanding of the right to opportunity and inclusion is a relatively recent development.
12:00 Disability as an identity group: diverse, porous, and socially constructed. Many people don’t choose to identify as disabled, Rosemarie says… until they run up against barriers and need to ask for accommodations.
17:45 Difference versus disability: is it a useful construct? Differences are an identity, Rosemarie says – and Identity is about “essential differences” – we may want to believe in them, but they can also be limiting. The answer? “We have the right to structure our own relationship with any of these identity groups.”
24:00 Disabilities and genetic counseling: the conflict, says Rosemarie, is one of autonomy and equality, as the right to “all the information” comes up against the threat of “eliminating certain classes of persons.”
29:00 What if there were no Down syndrome? Is this poster child for prenatal testing a necessary part of the spectrum... see more
Related Articles
If you ask the wrong question, you will certainly get the wrong answer. Likewise, if your questions are confusing or misleading, you may get answers that don’t make sense. In the worst of all worlds, the answers, right or wrong, can be misinterpreted to say something they clearly don’t.
The Pew survey of global attitudes to biotechnology research published on December 10 asks the wrong questions in a confusing way. This is significant, in itself and even more because all...
By Guardian Editorial, San Francisco Bay Guardian [cites CGS] | 10.01.2020
We were for Bernie. We think he would have won in 2016 and would win this year.
But it’s not time for arguing about that. The country is facing one of the deepest threats in its history, and Donald Trump...
By Emily Mullin, Medium | 09.29.2020
When Jessica Chaikof was born in February 1995, doctors at an Atlanta hospital placed a pair of headphones on her, piping sounds into her newborn ears while an electrode stuck to her tiny head measured her brain’s response to the...
By Christopher D. Wirz, Taylor & Francis Online | 09.29.2020
Gene editing is an inherently wicked problem
Societal debates about the applications of novel gene editing techniques like CRISPR in agriculture, wildlife, and humans have only rarely focused on questions that have correct or even factual answers. Of course, many...