Creative Commons
The overturning of Roe v. Wade makes me feel like I’m being held hostage by an unhinged gunman, a sentiment shared by several organizations representing people with disabilities. They fear the fallout from the U.S. Supreme Court’s action will be far-reaching.
Nine of these groups put out a statement saying that they were “outraged and gravely concerned,” shortly after the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was officially released on June 24.
“Our human rights include reproductive rights. Abortion rights are disability rights.”
“People with disabilities have the fundamental right to make decisions about our lives and bodies . . . this includes the right to decide whether or not to continue a pregnancy,” the statement reads. “People with disabilities are more likely to experience sexual assault, and people with some disabilities face increased and serious health risks from pregnancy. Disabled people need and deserve access to affirming and accessible reproductive health care services, including abortion.”
One of the groups that signed on to the statement, the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, spoke out forcefully on its own, too, in a statement that began, “Disabled people have the right to self-determination and bodily autonomy. We have the right to make our own decisions. Our human rights include reproductive rights. Abortion rights are disability rights.”
The National Disability Rights Network also put out a short statement that said, “Today it was the right to an abortion, tomorrow it could be other important rights like choice of who one can marry or access to other types of reproductive health. For people with disabilities, it might also mean whether or not they have a say in being sterilized, or whom they have intimate relations with, or the choice to live in the community. . . . This uncertainty that the Supreme Court can take away rights that people have had for decades is bad for all American society, including people with disabilities in so many different ways.”
That’s what scares me the most about all this: If these judges could so quickly and resolutely cast away fifty years of reproductive rights, then it’s perhaps a grim omen for other freedoms the court has power to strike down.. I wonder what other inalienable rights will eventually prove to, indeed, be quite alienable. In his concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas suggested that the legal rationale behind Dobbs should be used to reconsider decisions affirming the right to use contraceptives, and same-sex marriage and intimacy.
We all know that Thomas’s vision of the United States is exceedingly warped. But now he has enough buddies on the U.S. Supreme Court to try to make it a reality.