Dear Pro-Lifers, be Pro-Disabled Lives Too
I’ll be honest. I’m a single-issue voter. My single issue is disability rights. Who will protect the Americans with Disabilities Act? Who will protect and improve Medicaid? Who will make sure that people with pre-existing conditions are able to get healthcare? Fun bit of knowledge: All disabilities are pre-existing conditions. Every single one.
And I know more than a few people (even in my family) who will not care for my strong stance here. No doubt I will be told that I’m being selfish. I should put the country or God before my own priorities. Others have said I’m sacrificing the unborn to save the Americans with Disabilities Act and Medicaid. I’ve been told I should stop caring what’ll happen to me personally and vote for the pro-life candidate. I’ve been told I’m willing to allow (in their view) atrocities so that my life would be less hard. It’s the same thing most disabled people hear from their pro-life families and church friends every election. This article goes out to you.
The stakes have gotten higher
People have been saying we should vote for pro-life candidates and trust that God will work things out. I have some news: Those “pro-life” candidates aren’t pro-my life. Earlier in 2018, these “pro-lifers” in the Republican Party tried to gut the Americans with Disabilities Act with HR 620. The law would have made the ADA even harder to enforce and lowered the standard for compliance with the law from “removing barriers to access” to “making substantial progress” (whatever that means) on removing those barriers. And of course, this law would have given businesses even more time to delay complying with the ADA on top of the 28 years they’ve already had because they supposedly didn’t know about the ADA. This ignorance despite professional ADA consultants, government resources, and access to information about the law being right there on their cell phone (Google is your friend). The GOP was literally trying to make willful ignorance of the ADA into a legal excuse for not following the law. And let’s be real, if the law passed, there’d soon be another law granting another extension and another. Sort of like how Disney got copyright extensions.
The civil rights of the disabled in the classroom are also under attack. Secretary of Education DeVos has already slashed a bunch of guidelines regarding the civil rights of disabled students. This should surprise no one who watched her hearing in any capacity. Her response to whether or not schools should educate the disabled was that it should be left up to states. Funny story, before the IDEA and its predecessor, the states said no. Yes, even the progressive coastal states.
Medicaid has never been a friend of the GOP either. During the Trumpcare debate, not only was there an attempt to kill pre-existing condition protections (all disabilities fall into that category), there were deep cuts to Medicaid proposed. Let me tell you able-bodied folks a secret: You know those in-home caregivers that let people (maybe even your own kids or elderly family members) live in their homes, rather than in nursing ratholes, those job-training programs, and a lot of other things I am probably forgetting here? Private insurance doesn’t pay for that. Charities and crowdsourcing won’t. Medicaid does. It has done more to get disabled people into their community than any church. Without it, a great many disabled people would wind up back in institutions.
Also, if private insurance can choose not to cover us again, and Medicaid is slashed, it will be almost impossible for disabled people to get healthcare.
And before you give me the usual speech about trusting God, a lot of disabled people who died in institutions (often to abuse or unethical medical experiments) or to abusive families who stuffed them in closets were also Christians who trusted God. It didn’t work out for them. Pardon my skepticism.
Pro-life Christians gave the disabled a bad choice
When pro-life Christians say that many pro-Medicaid etc. disability rights activists are willing to throw the unborn under the bus because we’re afraid our lives will become slightly harder, they underestimate the problem. Without the ADA, Medicaid, etc. our lives would not just be hard, they would be almost impossible. It’s not a matter of faster or slower progress in the direction of a better America for the disabled. All the things I listed above, Medicaid, IDEA, the ADA, pre-existing condition protections, are the whole kit and caboodle of disability rights achievements. They are what brought us out of the dark days of institutions and closets and into our communities. And this generation of “pro-life” candidates is actively gunning for them.
Yet, we’re being told by our Christian families that if we don’t choose anti-abortion candidates over literally our own self-preservation, God will judge us. If that is His prerogative, sure. But how much worse will it be for those in the pro-life movement who have demonstrated a willingness to sell out the disabled to get people who will restrict abortion into office? They forced this choice between self-preservation and abortion upon us disabled folks. They couldn’t push pro-lifers who were also pro-ADA? There wasn’t one anti-euthanasia candidate who was also pro-Medicaid? I find that hard to believe. It’s not that pro-lifers couldn’t find candidates who were pro-life and pro-disability rights. They just didn’t want to. Instead, we get clowns like Jason Lewis, who literally compared the ADA to Jim Crow. And God won’t be excusing them either.
Consider the story of Balaam. Balaam brought pagan women to tempt the Israelites into sin. Israel was punished for giving into that sin but Balaam was also struck down. If a disabled person is sinning by voting for a pro-abortion candidate even when the other “pro-life” choice is someone who will kick the last 50 years of disability rights to the curb, then the pro-lifers are in trouble for forcing disabled voters to choose between this rock and a hard place. I have to imagine forcing people to choose between their actual physical lives and their religious convictions ranks higher on the sin scale than what Balaam did.
Here’s the sad part
The disability rights movement is primed to be a major ally of the pro-life movement. In any major right-to-die case (Terri Schiavo for example), the disability rights groups are often the first people on the ground. Not Dead Yet is one of the biggest anti-euthanasia groups in America. A lot of people with Down Syndrome aren’t too thrilled about the fact that prenatal genetic testing has led to what a U.N. panel actually called genocide. More than a few people on the autism spectrum are afraid of what will happen if/when a definitive way to detect autism in the womb is found. Due to our culture’s panic-mongering about autism (especially from Autism Speaks), the probability of mass abortions of autistic babies is a near-certainty. And once testing and aborting for autism becomes commonplace, services for autistic people will start drying up. After all, the logic will be, “Abortion for autism is possible and you didn’t utilize it so you’re on your own.” Count on it.
Yet here we are in yet another election with our pro-life Christian families telling us to choose between being pro-life and being pro-disability rights or risk judgment from God. This was never a choice that should have had to be made.
It’s time that the pro-life movement started using their influence to push for pro-disability candidates and policies. Pro-life should mean all life.