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Clarifying a previous post
Mar. 19th, 2015 09:50 amI wish to absolutely state that pregnant people are often treated like shit, and in all sorts of horribly complex ways. The medicalization of pregnancy is built from a number of different bricks, including infantizling women, treating women as alien beings, and a desire to turn a profit on an activity which, a large percentage of the time, does not need high-priced medical interventions. There's also a bunch of weird risk assessment errors that go into this. And so on and on.
However, my point is that pregnancy, child birth, and parenting are basic human experiences and that so is disability. The way in which we try to separate out various human experiences, and treat them differently, tends to be done based on our ideas of the value of people. And those ideas of value are constructed out of things like economic productivity, and that entire system sucks diseased rats through a straw. People do things. Lots of things. Some of them fall off mountains. Some of them get born with cerebral palsy. Some of them get pregnant. Some of them break their leg, and get better. Some smoke and don't get lung cancer, some don't smoke and do. Some of them exercise daily, some of them are slugs like me. Some of them (shudder) want to make art for a living. Good gods, some of them are even (whisper it) musicians.
When we say that we shouldn't treat working mothers as if they have a disability, what we are saying, by implication, is that disability is less worthy in some way. That it's fundamentally different. And yep, it's different. Everything is. Disabled people are often, actually, not sick, at least not in any useful sense. The fact that the model for handling disabled workers and the model for handling working parents is similar points to something very important. People have lives. They need, in the words of Bob, slack. And our system is designed to take away that slack. It is a sin and a shame to put people in competition for that bit of give in the system. And in a program dedicated to arguing that parents need a bit of slack, a parent denigrated the need of another human for a bit of slack in their life. "It makes me sick," she said. She found it revolting to be compared to someone who also, for whatever reason, needs slack.
Honestly, we over-medicalize disability, too. We get impatient that people don't just "get better." We focus on cures rather than accommodations. We fail to deal with real life issues and propose "cures" without ever trying to understand the implications of those "cures."
Did I misunderstand the point of the nice lady on the radio? It's possible. But I find it telling that so many people want to engage with the medicalization of pregnancy, and don't want to engage with the fundamental flaws of our economic/social system. The scrabble over pieces of the diminishing pie is real. Pay attention. It's a problem for all of us. We need, not a bigger piece of pie, but a whole new pie.
However, my point is that pregnancy, child birth, and parenting are basic human experiences and that so is disability. The way in which we try to separate out various human experiences, and treat them differently, tends to be done based on our ideas of the value of people. And those ideas of value are constructed out of things like economic productivity, and that entire system sucks diseased rats through a straw. People do things. Lots of things. Some of them fall off mountains. Some of them get born with cerebral palsy. Some of them get pregnant. Some of them break their leg, and get better. Some smoke and don't get lung cancer, some don't smoke and do. Some of them exercise daily, some of them are slugs like me. Some of them (shudder) want to make art for a living. Good gods, some of them are even (whisper it) musicians.
When we say that we shouldn't treat working mothers as if they have a disability, what we are saying, by implication, is that disability is less worthy in some way. That it's fundamentally different. And yep, it's different. Everything is. Disabled people are often, actually, not sick, at least not in any useful sense. The fact that the model for handling disabled workers and the model for handling working parents is similar points to something very important. People have lives. They need, in the words of Bob, slack. And our system is designed to take away that slack. It is a sin and a shame to put people in competition for that bit of give in the system. And in a program dedicated to arguing that parents need a bit of slack, a parent denigrated the need of another human for a bit of slack in their life. "It makes me sick," she said. She found it revolting to be compared to someone who also, for whatever reason, needs slack.
Honestly, we over-medicalize disability, too. We get impatient that people don't just "get better." We focus on cures rather than accommodations. We fail to deal with real life issues and propose "cures" without ever trying to understand the implications of those "cures."
Did I misunderstand the point of the nice lady on the radio? It's possible. But I find it telling that so many people want to engage with the medicalization of pregnancy, and don't want to engage with the fundamental flaws of our economic/social system. The scrabble over pieces of the diminishing pie is real. Pay attention. It's a problem for all of us. We need, not a bigger piece of pie, but a whole new pie.
