Why We Urgently Need to Change the Culture’s Attitudes Toward Disabilities

This is an awful story, but I think it is relevant to the underlying cultural struggle about people with disabilities reflected in the brouhaha set off by the Palins’ embrace of their son, Trig. In the UK, a mother is charged with murdering her 4-year-old daughter because she was “embarrassed” by the child’s disability. From the story:

Joanne Hill, 32, planned the murder after her husband refused to allow their daughter, Naomi, to be adopted, it was alleged. A jury heard how Mrs Hill struggled to cope caring for the youngster, who suffered with cerebral palsy. She wore callipers to help her walk and had poor hearing.

Opening the case for the prosecution Michael Chambers QC told Chester Crown Court that Mrs Hill was “ashamed and embarrassed” of her daughter’s condition and murdered her in a “determined and planned act”.

“Joanne Hill could not come to terms with the fact that her daughter Naomi was disabled,” he said. “Instead of seeking help from the social services, she quite deliberately and consciously acted to kill Naomi.”

People with disabilities have always been marginalized and sometimes killed. In ancient Rome, for example, they were exposed on hills. Less than 70 years ago in Nazi Germany, babies (and adults) with disabilities were murdered by doctors who called their eugenic genocide a “healing treatment.”

In our “enlightened times” the same bigotry is becoming positively mainstream. Princeton University’s Peter Singer and some other bioethicists argue that killing unwanted babies is perfectly fine since babies aren’t persons. Babies born with disabilities and terminal illnesses are already being subjected to infanticide in the Netherlands—acts of murder under Dutch law that go unpunished, and which have been supported by prestigious medical and bioethics journals such as in an article published in the prestigious Hastings Center Report. Here in America, 90% of fetuses testing with genetic anomalies such as Down or dwarfism are not allowed to be born—a eugenics action sometimes encouraged by doctors and genetic counselors. In Canada, Robert Latimer murders his daughter Tracy because she had cerebral palsy and is embraced by many there as a loving and compassionate father. Meanwhile, some people savage the Palins because they are affronted by Trig’s presence in the world and a Canadian medical official worries that it could mean more parents deciding not to abort their disabled babies.

And so, a mother kills her child because she is embarrassed by her daughter’s disability and we wonder: How would she ever come to hold such retrograde ideas?