UN Disability Treaty Fails in Senate Because of “Pro-Life” Senators
The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities was put up for a vote in the U.S. Senate today, and despite being largely uncontroversial, it failed. Why? Pro-lifers.
...read moreWhy Breastfeeding Is A Feminist Issue
What’s going so wrong with the breastfeeding and formula-feeding conversation? Start with the rampant individualism. Conversations about how you feed your baby tend to be preoccupied with women’s choices and decisions.. and then, blame. You know the conversation has little feminist value when you end up at a point where some poor, exhausted woman is [...]
...read moreOwning my food crazy
Trigger warning for discussion of dieting and food restriction. I have a confession to make. Over the last six months or so, I’ve lost a significant amount of weight. It’s my first time that my weight has gone down since I jumped on board the fat acceptance train, and I feel great. I have more [...]
...read moreOn Perfume, Chemical Cleaning agents and “Scent-free” workplaces.
A couple months ago, as I was enjoying karaoke night at the local Legion, I received a fairly disturbing phone call from a close friend of mine. She sounded absolutely horrible, and I was shocked to find out that she had just returned from the hospital after a rather exhausting night. My friend, a severe [...]
...read moreWomen refuses to give raped daughter EC, brags about it on internet.
Ah, the kindness of pro-lifers: [trigger warning]
...read moreMy Dark-Haired Daughter, who suffers from bipolar disorder and limited cognitive abilities, went missing last Monday. For more than 48 hours, we had no idea where she was. Without all the gruesome details, after she was found, it came to light that she’d been brutally and repeatedly sexually assaulted. She’d been taken to the local women’s shelter, where (at least in our area) they do the exams in such cases.
Disabled Bodies in Able-Bodied Contexts
No one wants to be pitied, but many people are comfortable having others to pity. And it’s easy, if you haven’t thought it out, to pity someone in a wheelchair, or someone who walks tapping her way with a white cane. It’s much more complicated to think about that wheelchair, or that cane as something that opens up the person’s life … and would open it up much more if buildings and streets were more accommodating to a variety of needs. It’s not only complicated, but potentially deeply disturbing, to think about high-tech prostheses, maximized for the needs of a particular person with particular skills at a particular time in his or her life, to think that a “disabled” person perhaps has something that works better than what “normal people” are issued with.
[Nudity below the fold]
Young woman captures her father’s abusive actions on tape
A young Texas woman with cerebral palsy was whipped and beaten by her father for downloading games and music — and she stealthily recorded the whole thing, then posted it to YouTube. A major wrinkle is that the girl’s abusive father is allegedly Aransas County Court-At-Law Judge William Adams. The video is incredibly disturbing, graphic [...]
...read moreAn experiment in asking politely for accessibility.
The argument that if (marginalized group of people) would just (!) ASK (nicely, in just the right way using exactly the perfect tone and obeying all the unwritten secret rules) for (their human rights), they would be given immediately them by the innocent benevolent rulers who just didn’t know what they needed is so common [...]
...read more12 Steps to Institutional Neglect and Compounded Violation
I feel like there should be a trigger warning for “just so generally horrible it makes me lose what little faith in humanity I had left,” but I will go with this: This story concerns sexual abuse of an intellectually disabled middle-schooler. If you can keep reading without cringing, you’re a stronger person than I. [...]
...read moreJailing women who try to commit suicide
Bei Bei Shuai tried to kill herself with rat poison last year. She survived. But she was pregnant, and her fetus died. Now she’s being charged with murder and attempted feticide. Shaui’s downward spiral began in late December, when her boyfriend blindsided her. It turned out the man who had fathered her baby and promised [...]
...read moreSending mentally ill people to Siberia
“He’s really really old and has therefore earned the right to say what he thinks” doesn’t really apply when the old person in question suggests sending mentally ill people to Siberia so that they can die of exposure, and when he says that Hitler did something right. Especially when the person in question is a [...]
...read moreA disability services funding wishlist
Here in the state of New South Wales, Australia, we have an election coming up on 26 March, so help us all. The head of the state government, Premier Kristina Keneally of the Australian Labor Party, has pledged $30 million in disability services funding. She’s not going to be re-elected – I’ve never known an [...]
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