Hey Abled People, You’re Spouting Eugenics Again

How ableism is unashamedly accepted and promoted in this alleged civilized society

Photo by CDC on Unsplash

The outrage of the week on TikTok — and I do not mean outrage as a disparaging statement about the disabled TikTok community — is that purposefully and willfully having disabled children is mean because they will suffer.

So we promote eugenics because someone will suffer. Let’s take a look at that, shall we?

By virtue of claiming, dear ableds, that you don’t want people to have disabled children because they will suffer, you are acknowledging that you have made the lives of disabled people miserable, intolerable, and unfair. All because you have set the world up in a way that creates additional suffering for us.

Why is it that no one ever thinks to themselves, " Hey, maybe we should make the lives of disabled people better so that they could have a better life, suffer less, and do all of the typical things that other people do, including having kids?”

Nope, their narrative and move is always, let’s just jump straight to eugenics and not let disabled people have children because they will suffer.

Let me tell you a secret that is not a secret. Everyone suffers in life.

Some marginalized groups indeed suffer more than others (and those with intersectional identities within the disabled community suffer more), but insert the name of any other marginalized group, and you will soon realize how ludicrous and ableist your argument is. At least you should.

There’s no difference, and promoting eugenics for disabled people is a very slippery slope, folks. Soon, they could declare being a BIPOC person to be a disability, and you would be gone.

They are already trying to do so with trans folks and other members of the LGBTQ+ community.

This is how we end up with camps. This is how we end up with genocides. This is how we end up with no one left.

Disability is not the problem. The system is the problem in more ways than one. Not having adequate support for disabled people is the problem.

Purposefully putting barriers in front of disabled people is the problem. Treating everyone, not just disabled people, as just cogs in a machine to be productive is the problem for us all.

In fact, so many of the words we use around humanity have to do with capitalism, like productivity, functioning, and value. They are all monetary words related to capitalism and are used to refer to human beings.

We are stuck in a money-making system, folks, that charges us to be born, charges us to be alive, and to die. No part of our life is not transactional anymore.

One of the few third spaces left is the public library. It is one of the last refuges of liberation and freedom. The powers that be are also trying to close the libraries.

You can see why. They do not want us to have community. They do not want us to congregate and speak to each other and get ideas.

It is capitalism and white supremacy that drive these ableist and eugenicist beliefs that disabled people have no worth (which again is also a capitalist-derived word).

It is the systems of power that are the problem, not those with disabilities. If those ignorant people who tell disabled people they shouldn’t have children had an ounce of knowledge, empathy, compassion, or humanity, or if they employed critical thinking skills about the bigger picture, they would realize that fact.

It is exhausting to have to defend my existence as a physically disabled, autistic DID system every day. It is disheartening to be told that I should be sent back to an institution by some troll that entered my TikTok Autism live yesterday.

I am tired of being worried about being homeless again and living in poverty with sporadic access to healthcare. I am tired of watching my kid be parentified because his dad and I are so autistically burned out by neurotypical society that we no longer have the cognitive capacity that he does.

None of those issues is my fault, and having an autistic child does not make me a mean and hateful person. It is an increasingly bleak world and he does deserve better. We all deserve better.

He and we, his disabled parents, are not the problem.

An indifferent society that values the bottom line over disabled people having safety and security with food, housing, and healthcare is to blame.

We cannot call ourselves a civilization if we leave the more disabled amongst us to fend for themselves and die trying.