One of John Franklin Stephen’s most iconic and impactful line. I remember hearing this exact line a few years back. It played on the tv briefly as part of a collage from a commercial of some sort. It was so quick and yet it bounced around in my head. I then watched the full videos of his speeches to the UN and to Congress.

I had an epiphany of sorts. I had always just assumed that with new technology arising, people, even those with down syndrome would be happy that there was a solution. But that was the issue. The problem was viewing that it is a problem, an issue in the first place. Plus I never even thought about what the “solution” really meant. There is no “cure” or “solution” our technology just allow us to see if a fetus will be born with down syndrome or not. Then they are most likely terminated. But that’s what I thought was great. Yet I didn’t really know or think about what it meant or the whole picture at all. It’s baffling to think that I didn’t have that sense of humanity in me.

I tried to crawling into his skin and walk around in it. And when I did, it leaves me with no words. To live in a world where people are constantly trying to kill people exactly like you. I can’t imagine it. The word that comes to mind is insulting but the emotions evoked are so much more than that. The audacity to proclaim a something an issue while walking alone side them. Rather than to want to treat people with down syndrome as equals, society viewed and views them as an issue to resolved; not a life. Incredible how that can happen.

A person that is filled with potential and value.

I know that this is a tricky issue. It deals with morality and ethics. About human life. It brings the question on how decides the value of a life. Of who gets a chance at life or not. Abortion is a tricky subject since the debate is that of rights over the one who will carry the fetus and about defending the defenseless fetus’s life. Yet more specifically when a parent is aware that they will have a fetus that will have a disability of some sort; an option is given of whether to continue or not. Marking it as unsuccessful procreation and the becomings of a defective person. Yet that view is so bias and not innate in us to think. It was designed by the society we live in. A medical definition gave us an understanding of what a normal healthy body should be like. It made us intolerant of people a little different than us.

A good article that talks about this and other issues about disability is “The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies by Blake Howe, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Neil Lerner, and Joseph Straus. It also made me think about the whole concept of what normal even means. How it is constructed to be, “in the nineteenth century, this ‘ideal body’ was usurped by the ‘normal body’. Normalcy, a concept popularized by the rise of statistics, imagines human morphology on a bell-shaped curve”(2 Howe, Jensen- Moulton, Lerner, Straus).

I remember in this article I read in my disability class about the idea of human diversity. Often times when I thought about diversity, I automatically think about races and ethnicities. Usually in school when we celebrate diversity we refer to the different types of races/ethnicities in our community like Hispanics and Asians. Yet the article talks about disability and I forgot how easily it could be applied too. In taking this class and many others in ucsb I really see how things are very interdisciplinary. Anyway the articles is called Human Biodiversity Conservation: A Consensual Ethical Principle by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. It talks about the conservation of the disabled, “expressed in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006), a treaty aimed ‘to promote, protect and ensure the full and equal enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms by all persons with disabilities, and to promote respect for their inherent dignity’ “(Thomson). At times it felt to me that disability was to be preserved for the sake of display or like in a collection, but it brings an important idea up. It is right in how it brings about protection and promotion of basic human rights. If we don’t defend other types of lives then it is a disservice to all types of life too. Like Martin Luther’s quote, “An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We shouldn’t feel superior or entitled to anyone else on the basis of something as random as race/ethnicity,gender, sexuality and body type.

Everyone needs to care for life in some degree. We need to regain and constantly remember our humanity.

We need to have respect for others and show decency. We need to be important for one another because we all need help, support and care. We need to matter to one another. And it starts with realizing that we deserve the same basic rights as everyone else. It’s about standing up to the injusts that people face. Especially those who are marginalized. Together we are stronger & better .