The abortion debate and its impact on the disabled community

As a disabled college student, I am constantly disappointed by the public's treatment of the disabled community in the recent debates regarding abortion rights. Despite renewed protests calling for bodily autonomy in the wake of the Supreme Court's recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, disabled individuals like myself continue to feel excluded from the conversation surrounding reproductive justice. This seems incredibly illogical given that reproductive and disability justice issues share significant similarities. Both the pro-choice and disability rights movements champion the right to personal choice, the right to bodily autonomy, the right to raise children (if one chooses to do so), the right to accessible healthcare, and the right to care that is free from political interference or stigmatization. However, even with their fundamental parallels, these movements rarely interact because of a quagmire of misinformation and miscommunication surrounding disability selective abortions.

Disability selective abortions, or the termination of pregnancy due to a prenatal disability diagnosis, create significant tension between the two human rights campaigns. Anti-abortion advocates promote the fiction that the right to choose itself is the root cause of disability selective abortion. However, the underlying cause is likely not the right to abortion, but the continued, sinister influence of eugenics on U.S. culture. While it is true that there is a 67% elective abortion rate for women who receive a positive prenatal diagnosis for Down syndrome, it is reductive to claim that the decision to terminate the pregnancy exclusively results from the right to choose. Rather as evidenced by the fact that these women chose to have abortions only after receiving a prenatal diagnosis, the choice is made specifically because the child, if carried to term, would be disabled. Crucially, ableism, not the right to choose, is the underlying cause for this kind of abortion. This statistic, then, does not support the recent SCOTUS decision or the denial of bodily autonomy for pregnant women. Rather, it is an indication that the reproductive rights movement needs to include disability justice advocates in order to truly champion bodily autonomy. Pro-choice advocates, then, must counter the anti-abortion narrative that disabled persons are inevitably the victims of abortion rights. We are only the victims when the public is ignorant as to the lives of disabled people.

Additionally, the cooption of disability rights arguments by anti-abortion advocates, especially those who also champion the prohibition of contraception, is baffling and infuriating. According to the National Women's Law Center only two states prohibit forced sterilization of disabled people and 31 actually have laws explicitly allowing it. The indication is that 48 states currently operate under a framework suggesting that disabled people are unfit for child rearing. The Dobbs decision, then, establishes a paradox in which disabled people are both perceived as incapable of parenting and forced to give birth in a nation with insufficient foster care resources.

The failure of the pro-choice movement to amplify disabled voices is also as bewildering as it is concerning considering the primary reasons why most people advocate for abortions are also disability issues. Studies show that 40% of disabled women experience sexual assault or physical violence in their lifetime. The new post-Dobbs laws prohibiting or limiting abortions will inevitably disproportionately affect disabled people because disabled people face a higher risk of pregnancy through rape than the general population. Similarly, according to the Center for American Progress, disabled women have a poverty rate of 22.9% compared with the 11.4% rate for their nondisabled counterparts. Thus, disabled women are more likely to lack the necessary resources to raise a child than the general population. Most obviously, disabled women already face health complications that may make pregnancies dangerous. Abortion, then, is actually healthcare for disabled people for whom carrying a child would be incredibly detrimental.

It is also important to note that, for the disabled community, restricting abortion rights did not begin with Dobbs. The Hyde Amendment, for example, prohibits the use of Medicaid dollars to fund abortion services. Since more than 1 in 3 adult Medicaid enrollees under age 65 has a disability this means that disabled people are disproportionately affected by the aforementioned restriction.

Reproductive rights movements are very synchronous with disability rights as persons such as myself struggle for bodily autonomy in a world in which we are constantly stripped of it. To garner the support of the disabled community, abortion rights advocates should promote social, political, and economic resources for disabled persons so they can make their own decisions in life, much as is being advocated for pregnant individuals. If this is accomplished, the disabled community has every reason to support the right to a safe and legal abortion - a right that sadly might be needed by the disabled during their lifetime.