Disability and Rationing of Care amid COVID-19
By Katrina N. Jirik,
Bill of Health
| 04. 13. 2020
As medical professionals and bioethicists deal with the conundrum involved in establishing rationing of care guidelines, the mantra of the disability community comes to mind. Nothing about us, without us.
As health care resources grow increasingly scarce amid the COVID-19 pandemic, states, hospitals, and individuals are forced to make tough decisions about the rationing of care. These decisions are often framed in terms of medical and/or legal criteria. However, many people, especially the physicians who make the difficult decisions, realize they have a huge moral component related to perceptions of the value of an individual’s life.
Various states have triage guidelines in place, which differ somewhat, but primarily reflect a utilitarian goal of saving the most people with the least expenditure of finite resources. This is where the societal issue of the value of the life of a person with a disability comes into play.
Many of the guidelines state that the decision to treat needs to consider co-morbidities and anticipated resource use in the future. This is updated eugenic thought, whereby you have only the survival of the fittest, with an assumed understanding of what “the fittest” actually entails. These conceptions are based on a medical model of disability, something many people with disabilities find extremely problematic. It’s also...
Related Articles
By Zusha Elinson, The Wall Street Journal | 08.12.2025
BERKELEY, Calif.—Tsvi Benson-Tilsen, a mathematician, spent seven years researching how to keep an advanced form of artificial intelligence from destroying humanity before he concluded that stopping it wasn’t possible—at least anytime soon.
Now, he’s turned his considerable brainpower to promoting...
By Rob Stein, NPR [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 08.06.2025
A Chinese scientist horrified the world in 2018 when he revealed he had secretly engineered the birth of the world's first gene-edited babies.
His work was reviled as reckless and unethical because, among other reasons, gene-editing was so new...
By Susanna Smith, Genetic Frontiers | 07.28.2025
Key Topics
How does the American far right view genetics and genetic technologies?
What is the history of the American cultural pursuit of trying to choose smarter children? What has science shown us about the relationship of heredity and intelligence...
By Arthur Caplan and James Tabery, Scientific American | 07.28.2025
An understandable ethics outcry greeted the June announcement of a software platform that offers aspiring parents “genetic optimization” of their embryos. Touted by Nucleus Genomics’ CEO Kian Sadeghi, the $5,999 service, dubbed “Nucleus Embryo,” promised optimization of...