Call for Support – Rally May 15 from Noon – 1 pm

42 million in cuts to services for the disabled in Alberta!

Over the past several months you may have been aware that Persons with Developmental Disabilities (PDD) has been directed, along with many other social programs, to make arrangements for budget cuts. These cutbacks are happening alongside an effort by PDD to better regulate funding models for people. These changes, unfortunately, make what we need to present at this time more complicated. Administrative changes around assessing support needs is co-mingled with the severe funding cutbacks being experienced across the province of Alberta.

Special Issue of the International Journal of Disability, Community & Rehabilitation (IJDCR) with the theme What Sorts of People Should There Be?

Special Issue of the International Journal of Disability, Community & Rehabilitation (IJDCR) with the theme What Sorts of People Should There Be?
Edited by Gregor Wolbring, Associate Professor Community, Rehabilitation and Disability Studies, Department of Community Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Calgary, Canada is now available.

Parents try to force surrogate mother to abort their disabled baby

Blogger Cassy Fiano writes about parents who try to  force their surrogate to abort their disabled baby. Cassy is has two sons, one has Down Syndrome.

Crystal Kelley wanted to give the gift of a baby to a family who couldn’t have children. She also needed the money that surrogacy brings. And so, she ended up becoming a surrogate mother to a couple in her state of Connecticut who had three children but wanted more. The first half of the pregnancy was friendly and happy, with Kelley and the parents communicating regularly.

Then there was an irregular ultrasound. After several more ultrasounds, the picture was clear: this was a baby who would be born with some disabilities. She had a cleft lip and palate, a cyst on her brain, and a heart defect. The baby’s parents immediately began to pressure Kelley to have an abortion, claiming it was the more “humane” option. Now, most decent people wouldn’t consider it humane to rob a child of her life simply because she might have a disability. This was the way that Kelley felt, and she refused to have an abortion

Meet the New Eugenics, Same as the Old Eugenics

From the Center for Genetics and Society blog, by Gina Maranto, Biopolitical Times guest editor, March 4, 2013

The unfortunate truth is that discredited ideas never do die, they just rise again in slightly altered forms—witness eugenics. Despite the horrors perpetuated in its name, including forced sterilization and the Holocaust, the eugenic impulse is with us still. One of the forms it takes is schemes for “improving” offspring through the selection and manipulation of embryos.

In the last year or so, one neo-eugenic advocate in particular has been garnering media attention. He’s Julian Savulescu, holder of an array of titles, including an endowed chair and directorship of a center at the University of Oxford funded by the Uehiro Foundation on Ethics and Education.

Articles and Audio clips on the closure of Michener

Headlines read: Michener Centre formerly the Provincial Training School (PTS) for Mental Defectives closes – celebration for some but not for everyone

A series of articles have been written about the closure of the Michener Centre.  Living Archives team members, Leilani Muir and Bruce Uditisky have commented to reporters about their reactions to the closure. Both applaud the decision but many others criticize the decision to close Michener. The loss of jobs and the disruption for current residents are concerns for supporters of the institution.  However, amidst mixed reaction the Michener stands as a reminder of our recent history of eugenics and the institutionalization of thousands of individuals. The shift towards a more inclusive society and away from isolation and initialization is a change towards recognizing and perhaps even appreciating human variation.

Here are links to several different articles:

Decision to close Red Deer’s Michener Centre prompts mixed reactions

Decision to close Red Deer’s Michener Centre prompts mixed reactions.

“Baby M”, End of Life Policy, and the Stollery Children’s Hospital

Some of you may be aware of the matter of “Baby M”, involving a 2-year-old child who was admitted to the Stollery Children’s Hospital in Edmonton, Alberta, on May 25, 2012. She required a ventilator for life support. Despite the parents’ opposition to the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment, which incorporated their religious beliefs, the Court of Queen’s Bench found that it was in the child’s best interests to terminate life support and, on September 14, 2012, ordered the withdrawal of the ventilator. The Court held that there is a general notion in society that a life dependent upon machines and without awareness is not in the best interests of any patient. On September 19, 2012, a three member panel of the Court of Appeal held that there was no error in principle in the Queen’s Bench decision and the appeal was dismissed. On September 20, 2012, the Supreme Court of Canada dismissed the parents’ application for a further stay. “Baby M’s” ventilator was removed, she suffocated, and died.

 
The parents are appealing to the Supreme Court of Canada to have Canada’s highest court decide important issues regarding termination of life-sustaining medical treatment. This decision of the lower courts and, if leave is granted, the ultimate decision of the Supreme Court of Canada will decide the process that will be used and who will make decisions to terminate life support.

These decisions of the Alberta Courts and how they will be followed in the future may ultimately affect individuals in your organization or your community. Should you believe that you, your organization, or community have a position on these life and death issues that should be heard and considered

Contemporary practices of sterilization in Australia

As a follow up to the post in the first link below, here is a list of further related links on those wanting to know more.  Thanks to a helpful anonymous reader of the What Sorts blog who provided most of the links below but who doesn’t wish to be identified.  Folks in Oz: let us know if you have more information, are undertaking action, whatever.

• http://whatsortsofpeople.wordpress.com/2012/11/01/forced-sterilization-and-disability-in-australia/  Recent What sorts blog post on forced sterilization in Australia TODAY:

• 1997 & 2001: reports from the Human Rights Commission in Australia that discuss the practice.
• 1998– official document assessing situation, number of sterilizations per year, convenience of sterilizing disabled woman http://www.familycourt.gov.au/wps/wcm/resources/file/ebb8810487b4021/MURRAY.pdf
• 2001- Study and report from Women With Disabilities Australia.  Thorough, including much relevant history, sterilization survivor testimony and narratives, as well as a talk given by Adrienne Asch, and references to the significance of the Canadian eugenic history here, and reports “The Sterilization of Leilani Muir” as one of two video source. http://www.ag.gov.au/Documents/HRPB%20-%20NHRAP%20-%20Baseline%20Study%20-%20Submission%20-%20Women%20with%20Disabilities%20Australia%20-%20Attachment%205.PDF
• Leilani Muir on The Current, with Anna Maria Tremonti

“A fundamentally eugenic rhetoric”

I have no desire to rekindle the flame of this man’s still unrepentant posture that ending Tracy’s life was a blameless act. My quarrel here is not with a Saskatchewan farmer, or an Ontario mother, or any other horribly misguided parent seeking to end the life of a disabled child. My quarrel is with the clichés and platitudes that both foster and condone a very particular homicidal impulse. It is a preposterous notion that Tracy’s life did not conform to the law of nature that Robert somehow epitomizes.  The simplistic morality of pitting the “law of nature” against the “law of a nation” – the core assertion of Global’s Taking Mercy – must be exposed for what it is: a fundamentally eugenic rhetoric.

Check out Catherine Frazee on Global’s “Taking Mercy”, and on the Latimer case more generally, from whom this paragraph is taken.

Recompensation for Eugenic Sterilization in North Carolina Thwarted

Eugenic Sterilization laws were in effect in North Carolina between 1929 and 1974 – dates very close to the existence of such laws in Alberta, Canada (from 1928 to 1972), which resulted in nearly 8,000 sterilizations.  These focused originally on those who were mentally ill or mentally retarded, and living in institutions.  However, this grew to include criminals, the blind, the deaf, the disabled, alcoholics, those suffering from epilepsy, and those who were poor.

The debate for compensating these victimes have been ongoing for some time in the Carolinas, eventually culminating in the creation of a bill that went to the General Assembly, suggesting that each victim be paid $50,000 by the government.  In Alberta, a number of cases against the government have been successful in gaining compensation for wrongful sterilization, including the well-known case of Leilani Muir.    However, the General Assembly voted this past week against these measures.

The General Assembly cites the tough economic time, and the difficulty they have in justifying spending $10 million when the money is not in the budget.  They further justify their decision, saying that history cannot be changed, and that are indeed many suppressed groups over history, including slaves and Aboriginals, who have suffered.  These statements have generated even more debate.  For more articles and reactions, see links below.

Links

1. Tax Provision Could Thwart Compensation for Eugenic Victims – Carolina Journal
2. Changing History – Mount Airy News
3. No Easy Answers – Mount Airy News
4. Column  - Winston-Salem Journal

Follow up on Hidden Ultrasound Results

On April 18, 2012, I posted an article from the Toronto Star, detailing how hospitals in the GTA have been telling their staff to stop telling the sex of a fetus from an ultrasound to parents, in order to prevent gender-based abortions.  Recently, the CBC used “hidden cameras” in order to explore the state of the situation in private ultrasound clinics across Canada.  Their discoveries are detailed in the article below.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2012/06/12/ultrasound-gender-testing.html

Gender testing is very prevalent in private clinics, and further, Canada offers no law preventing clinics from sharing gender with parents before the 20 week mark (after which most doctors will not provide abortions), unlike China, India, and the UK.  The US recently tried to pass a similar law, but the proposal fell through, as it was determined to be impossible to prove why parents would request gender.

The article suggests that further education would be greatly beneficial to parents on the value of both female and male children.

Eugenics in Toronto – Hiding Ultra-sound results

The Toronto Star recently released an article on the fact that many GTA hospitals, “particularly those in ‘ethnic’ areas [...] won’t let their ultrasound staff tell pregnant women the sex of the fetus,” in order to prevent abortion.

A study from St. Michael’s Hospital reveals that while male/female rations for first child of immigrants from India is 105/1oo, the ratio for third children of immigrants was 136/100.  Although researchers caution that their findings are not actually evidence of female feticide (indeed, they do not know why results have turned out as such) and urge people not to racially profile citizens after that, it has caused some concern in the community, and resulted in withheld ultrasounds.

http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1162357–female-feticide-is-it-happening-in-ontario?bn=1

http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1162613–six-gta-hospitals-won-t-reveal-fetal-sex-during-ultrasound?bn=1

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1163258–hiding-toronto-hospital-ultrasound-results-to-prevent-sex-selection-is-pointless-and-possibly-racist

Bioethicist, Tom Koch, commented on pregnant women who choose to abort a fetus with Down syndrome, “We’re engaged in eugenics.”

Haraway and the (Im)possibility of Cyborg Eugenics – Presentation by Joshua St. Pierre

Last week, on March 23, 2012, Joshua St. Pierre, one of the summer interns from the Living Archives Project who is currently working on his MA in Philosophy at the University of Alberta, gave a presentation entitled, “Haraway and the (Im)possibility of Cyborg Eugenics.”

His abstract from the conference is as follows:

While the discourse of so-called “new eugenics” is becoming increasingly popular in cyberculture, I argue that new eugenics is discussed as a mere technological overlay of pre-existing eugenic ideologies, ideologies undercut by “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Donna Haraway’s cyborg resists the natural and essential properties (racial, class or genetic purity, normalized categories such as “feeble mindedness,” or binaries like primitive/civilized) which made twentieth century eugenic programs, and by extension new eugenics, possible. However, Haraway’s politically and eugenically resilient cyborg opens the possibility for a “cyborg eugenics” proper.

Instead of essential properties, Haraway argues that human diversity and biotic components must be conceived of in terms of “design, boundary constraints, rates of flow, systems logics, costs of lowering constraints” (162). Thus, the Harawaian cyborg translates the modern concepts of ‘eugenics’ and ‘perfection’ to the concepts of ‘population control’ and ‘optimization’ (161).  While the terms ‘optimal’ and ‘population control’ lack the totalizing ideological overtones of a “master race” or the “feeble minded,” such categories force the choice of what sorts of people there should be, fragmented or not, and therefore what sorts of people there should not be.

Paralleling Hannah Arendt’s account of the banal holocaust logistician Adolf Eichmann, I argue that cyborg eugenics arise indirectly from the non-reflective fixation of the cyborg on optimizing technical problems. The Harawaian cyborg thus resists forms of eugenics rooted in claims of nature, telos or purity, but is seemingly unaware of the dark eugenic possibilities latent in the language of instrumentalization and optimization.

 It was a very interesting presentation, that provided a lot to think about in terms of the role of eugenics as modern technology evolves and becomes incorporated in the human, and the role of eugenics in posthuman literature.

Tommy Douglas, young eugenicist

from The National Post, by Michael Shevell

This NP article is itself taken from a longer article in the January 2012 issue of the Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences.

Though bespectacled and slight of build, Tommy Douglas is a giant of 20th Century Canadian history. His iconic, indeed mythic, status within the Canadian historical landscape is exemplified by his selection, in 2004, as “The Greatest Canadian” in a CBC-mandated competition above such luminaries as former Prime Ministers Pierre Elliot Trudeau and Lester Bowles Pearson, scientist Frederick Banting, and hockey great Wayne Gretzky. This honour reflects Douglas’ role as the “father” of Canadian Medicare, which has emerged, for better or worse, as a defining feature of a Canadian national identity.

Medicare has in effect emerged as a statement of national values. Values that include compassion, fairness, tolerance and equality; values that are not selectively applied, but are extended to embrace even the most vulnerable of Canadians.

Eugenics, by contrast, concerns itself at its most fundamental level with the selective breeding of humanity to improve the human species. At a practical level, eugenics in the 20th century involved the removal from the gene pool by various means those classes of individuals considered “inferior stock,” whose deficits had an inherited basis that was immutable for future generations. These classes included those suffering from mental illness, intellectual disability or what was characterized as social diseases (e.g, alcoholism, delinquency).

The broad principles of universal-access medicare contradict those that can be utilized to justify the practice of eugenics. It would be paradoxical for an individual to support both. Yet Tommy Douglas did so with moral persuasion. Careful analysis of this contradiction reveals with hindsight further paradoxes that merit consideration. … read more

CCD Calls on Global to Stage Follow-up Episode

Recently, Dick Sobsey wrote about the Live Euthanasia Debate airing on Global Television’s 16 x 9 program.

The show, “Taking Mercy”, also featured a Live Blog including comments from several members of the What Sorts Network.

Alex Schadenberg, Executive Director with the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, wrote a post condemning the one-sidedness of the show and comparing the “propaganda” in the 16 x 9 episode with the eugenic attitudes that led to the Nazi euthanasia program.

The Council of Canadians with Disabilities has also responded to the lack of an opposing perspective in the so called “debate”. The CCD is challenging Global to stage a follow-up episode.

We are challenging Global, in the name of journalistic balance, to stage a follow-up episode featuring persons with disabilities who want to live and who see a danger in opening up the debate on euthanasia. Only good can come from providing an opportunity for a broader, fairer public discourse.

If you agree that the perspective of those opposed to euthanasia should be represented in a follow-up episode, please take a minute to write to Global representatives at the addresses listed in CCD’s response to “Taking Mercy”.

Eugenic Reasoning in Legal Phrasing?

Argentina’s strict anti-abortion laws got a minor make-over recently, as the Supreme Court of Argentina has ruled that rape victims will not be persecuted for having abortions.  The supreme court unanimously backed the decision of allowing a 15-year-old girl, who endured years of sexual abuse by her stepfather, to terminate her pregnancy.  “However, the judges said that their decision was not part of a discussion about the legalisation of abortion in Argentina, but just a clarification of existing laws” (see article).

The controversy was centred around Section 2, Article 86 of the Argentine penal code, which states that “abortion is not a punishable act ‘if the pregnancy stems from a rape or an attack on the modesty of a woman of feeble mind’” (see article).  The horrible suffering of the poor 15-year old aside, it is interesting to note that the Argentinian law’s phrasing includes “feeble mindedness” in its allowances for legal abortions.  Curiously (and I think quite tellingly), the point of debate in interpreting the law had to do with whether or not all rape victims or just those who are deemed “feeble minded” should be allowed to terminate their pregnancies.

Now, putting the phrase “feeble minded” in the sentence cannot have anything to do with informed consent (and the fact that some individuals might be deemed incapable of giving it) since the law pertains to rape cases, which, by their very definition, are instances where neither informed nor any other kind of consent can or ever is given.  What might be the reason the phrase “feeble minded” made its way into the sentence and why might it be unclear to those interpreting the law whether or not it covered all or just “feeble minded” rape victims?  If I were to venture a guess, I would say that eugenic reasoning is likely responsible for the legal phrasing the judges had such difficulty interpreting.

California’s dark legacy of forced sterilizations

http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/15/health/california-forced-sterilizations/index.html?hpt=hp_c1

Sweden Moves to End Forced Sterilization of Transgender People

Sweden, “one of 17 [countries] in the European Union,” may soon change a law that requires transgendered people to become sexually sterilized if they decide to officially change gender.  Sweden has made moves to repeal the law in January, only to be stopped by the Christian Democrat Party.  However, this party has recently changed their mind, allowing the repeal to go through.

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2012/02/sweden-moves-to-end-forced-sterilization-transgender-people

This move was partially in thanks to an online petition, by AllOut (http://allout.org/en/actions/stop_forced_sterilization), which gained 80,000 international signatures to repeal the law.  However, the date for repealing the law is still pending.

Countries that still require sterilization include France, Italy, Romania, Poland, Greece, and Portugal.  For a map outlining the current status of European sterilization, you can link here: http://motherjones.com/mojo/2012/02/most-european-countries-force-sterilization-transgender-people-map

Ethicist gets hate mail

A Melbourne academic has triggered an ethical storm by suggesting it is acceptable to kill newborns in so-called after-birth abortions if parents do not want them.

Ethicist Francesca Minerva said yesterday that she had received hate mail since a provocative article she co-wrote with Dr Alberto Giubilini appeared online.

They argued after-birth abortion should be allowed in cases when abortion would be permitted, including if a child had a defect such as Down syndrome.

Even in cases where the baby was born perfectly healthy, parents should have the right to end the life of the child if their own wellbeing was at risk.

The researchers said a newborn baby and a foetus were “morally equivalent” and both were “potential people”.

“If criteria such as the social, psychological and economic costs for potential parents are good enough reasons for having an abortion even when the foetus is healthy…then the same reasons which justify abortion should also justify the killing of the potential person when it is as the stage of a newborn, they said.

Adopting out an unwanted baby was not necessarily a solution because the mother might suffer psychological distress from giving up her child for adoption.

Dr Minerva said the article was not intended for public debate but rather for discussion among bioethicists.

“This debate has been going on for 30 years,” she said.

The BMJ Group said the researchers had been subjected to personal abuse, including threats to their lives.

It said the concept of infanticide was not new and the researchers had made an argument that deserved to be heard without receiving hostile abuse.
Catholic Respect Life executive officer Bronia Karniewicz said the argument that killing a healthy baby rather than putting them up for adoption because it might better benefit the parents was disturbing.

the article can be found here: http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/wa/13056055/ethicist-gets-hate-mail/

Australian paper says Euthanizing Babies should be allowed

A paper published in the Journal of Medical Ethics argues that abortion should be extended to make the killing of newborn babies permissible, even if the baby is perfectly healthy, in a shocking example of how the medical establishment is still dominated by a vicious mindset.

The paper is authored by Alberto Giubilini of Monash University in Melbourne and Francesca Minerva at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne.

The authors argue that “both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons,” and that because abortion is allowed even when there is no problem with the fetus’ health, “killing a newborn should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.”

The complete article can be found here:http://www.eutimes.net/2012/03/australian-paper-says-euthanizing-babies-should-be-allowed-as-abortion/