Disability Matters

David Cameron wants to be the next prime minister of the United Kingdom, so it’s tricky to judge whether his latest pronouncement Monday in London’s Daily Mail about people with disabilities is a political move or whether he really believes that people with disabilities, in his words, are defective.

Here’s what he said: Generally my approach is I want to improve the process of dealing with the genetic defects and diseases that cause so much suffering…When you have been for genetic counselling and had the answer it could be this or that it could be that, the idea of medical science advancing is not without its attractions.

At last, a new euphemism for getting rid of so-called imperfect people: improving the process of dealing with genetic defects, something which Cameron sees as an advance of medical science.

Two questions seem relevant to me.

First, why would Cameron go the defective route when his son, Ivan, has severe cerebral palsy and suffers from seizures? Ivan’s CP isn’t genetic, and was probably caused by any number of factors before or during birth. So, is Cameron making a distinction between genetic defects, which he thinks need to be “improved,” via attractive medical science advancement, and Ivan’s condition, which is not? Or, even worse, is Cameron implying that Ivan shouldn’t have been born?

Second, I think Cameron is throwing around the word defective too easily. Defective to whom? Many people Cameron would consider defective are, in other cultures, considered precious. Who decides the norms of defectiveness? Trying to reach a consensus on what is and is not a defect holds the potential for making distinctions I’d rather not consider. What other forms of defect might we invent to go along with people with disabilities? The Nazis considered Jews defective, as they did people with disabilities, including those, like Ivan, with CP and seizures. Might we, sometime in the future, consider brown eyes defective? Blond hair? Females?

Of course, we are far down the road of eliminating people with disabilities. We seem to have learned very little from the past.

Eugenics is alive and well in a country that not too many decades ago helped end the same idea and subsequent genocidal behavior that the loyal leader of the opposition now seems to support.