Thursday, April 4, 2013
The impossible terrain of motherhood
If you don't follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you may not know that I had another article published today--this one in the online publication The Feminist Wire (good stuff over there! Check it out!). This piece is in response to an article my friend Keira Williams wrote at TFW in March. It's about Cynthia Wachenheim, the woman who killed herself and attempted to kill her baby. Really a sad story, with one component that deals with our beliefs about disability.
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Love this - loved how you dove into that murky grey area btwn pro-choice and termination because of disability, something I've said before I'm profoundly uncomfortable with. Have I mentioned how much I'm looking forward to your new book?
ReplyDeleteI really liked this article, too, and I'm grateful for all the stimulation -- there is much to think about and chew on, perhaps be re-galvanized by --
ReplyDeleteOnward --
Great article and a very tragic story. I sometimes find overlap in society's stigmatization of people with disabilities and the historic stigmatization of LGBT people. For example, upon coming out to my liberal parents, their first reaction was one of fear that I would "suffer" because of how society treated LGBT people. What if there was an in-utero test for queerness? Would parents choose to terminate out of fear of potential future suffering? I also think that the LGBT story brings a message of hope as being gay or lesbian (not so much trans or queer) has lost much of its stigma as a "path to suffering" as society has changed and people see more positive images and positive policies. This societal change is in play in terms of how people think about abilities and disabilities today because of writers/thinkers/activists/families out there like you who are helping people reframe and examine their assumptions. This, in spite of the extreme nature of some of the comments on Motherlode. May the Force be With You!
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