A New Eugenics Wave: Trying to Make Disability and Disease Disappear

^{Photo of Judy Heumann by Taylordw, 
CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons}

Back in the 1980s when I was a budding journalist publishing articles related to women and health while working as Program Director for the National Women’s Health Network, I had the privilege of interviewing Judy Heumann and her collaborator Ed Roberts. Judy was known by then as the Mother of the Disability Movement and Ed was called the Father of Independent Living.

Judy, who died in 2023, had contracted polio as a child who then spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair.  She was denied the right to attend school because she was considered a fire hazard at the age of five. That was the seed that led to her life’s work. Determined to work with other disabled people, she helped found the Berkeley Center for Independent Living and the World Institute on Disability with Ed, who also had polio at the age of fourteen. It left him completely paralyzed and on a respirator for the rest of his life.  Undeterred, Ed fought to...