Cooking up a fallacious (and offensive) comparison

Piny over at Feministe recently discussed my post on the New Zealand murder where the convicted man received a lighter-than-typical sentence for killing a disabled man. He was generous about what I had to say, but he also follows the logic of the problem and shows how smart he is:

In “The Disability Gulag” and assorted other writings, Harriet MacBryde Johnson makes the point that terms like heroic measures and special accomodations can be extremely ableist: they start at a zero/norm of “needs no assistance,” and trend upward through “needs a lot of assistance.” This can be a problem, because it implies that lives like hers exist at an extreme of social obligation; her needs are not given parity, and her life becomes an indulgence. It also means that people most in need of recognition are least likely to receive it.

and

So when a court decides that an assistant has less of a responsibility to hurt disabled people, or decides that sustained contact with disabled people mitigates culpability for murder, the only vulnerability it creates is an “extraordinary” one. This decision poses an enormous threat to people who need caregivers. It defines reliance on caregivers as an imposition on those who provide care–so much so that disabled people may expect violent reprisal for all that “stress.” All of that is invisible, because lives in which caregivers are mundane are invisible.

Then Bob over at Creative Destruction riffs off of Piny's post and things go downhill from there. Cooking up a comparison between disabled people and fetuses, he calls his post "Sauce for the Handicapped [sic], Sauce for the Unborn," and before we know it we're not only comparing the killing of a grown man and former paralympian athlete to abortion, but the resulting comments devolve into a tired debate among nondisabled people about how a person is no longer a "person" (but still "human") when their cerebral cortex shuts down. "Intrinsic value," life support and even animal rights are mentioned. It's very depressing, even more so because this is the first post categorized as "Disability Issues" at that group blog.

(Note to self: Request Feministe add a Disability category to their index so the fine recent discussions over there can be accessed more easily.)

Back to the lumpy gravy. Along with some inaccurate assumptions about what pro-choice feminists (Are there any other kind?) all believe, Bob says this:

The logic that the judge used in ameliorating the consequences of Smail's killing is orthogonal to the logic used by pro-choice advocates. The jump from "it's OK to kill a fetus" to "it's OK to kill a cripple" does not appear to be overwhelmingly large in magnitude. It seems like a fairly tricky endeavour to try to justify one as being obviously acceptable while the other remains a monstrous crime - particularly if you choose to defend abortion but condemn the killing of the disabled. After all, Keith McCormick was never going to get better - was never going to become a full human being in the Singerian ethical sense. But a fetus fairly quickly becomes an independent being with a full life ahead of him or her.

To amuse those who know me very well, I will enumerate my issues with the above paragraph.

Number one: Language, language. "Cripple." Oh, how I wish there existed truly offensive epithets uniquely designed for nondisabled white men that made them feel the burn too. They seem to be the ones who mind the least using other group's slurs to make a point. Why do you suppose that is?

Second. Umm, yeah, it is a huge jump to compare murdering a living breathing full-grown man with family and friends who have interacted with him for decades to abortion of a fetus. The former is here with the rest of us doing all the daily things anybody does and the latter might be here sometime in the future sharing the experience.

The fact that both a quadriplegic and a fetus need some help to survive does not make them equal anymore than it makes a nondisabled person and a fetus equal. A quad needs assistance with most daily activities (and maybe the technology or service animal to help do care for himself) and a fetus needs to feed off the body of another human being for many months until it can hopefully survive in the planetary environment the rest of us exist in, even then with a high level of care. I do think it's fair to compare the level of assistance a person with quadriplegia needs to that an infant needs, but that's not the same as the unborn.

And McCormick didn't have to be looking forward to a cure to value his life as it was, whatever pain it involved -- remember there was no evidence whatsoever that he thought his life should end. Perhaps it's surprising to know that many of us severely disabled people believe our lives have incredible value even if we will never "get better." Health and ability are great things, if you've got them, but they do not create the essence of what is valuable in life.

Third, a fetus does not "fairly quickly (become) an independent being with a full life ahead of him or her." I imagine many, if not most, mothers who bear the brunt of the childraising work would not say that years of assistance is "quick," except in the sentimental sense. Surely no teenager I've known believes their "independence" arrives quickly. I'd argue nondisabled "independence" is myth anyway, but that's for another day. Also, Bob presumes a fetus will be born nondisabled and remain that way when that's really not what the warranty guarantees, so the presumption of independence is pointless.

Finally, philosopher Peter Singer's ethics with regard to disabled people are creepy enough without applying them incorrectly. He doesn't claim to support involuntary euthanasia for persons who are physically impaired but remain mentally unimpaired, and I don't believe he'd support the murder of McCormick as Bob seems to imply. Singer's preference utilitarianism does suggest McCormick's life would have less "utility" than a nondisabled person's life, but a fetus wouldn't even qualify as a "person" in his ethical world so again the comparison fails.

None of what I've argued above -- or, in fact, any disagreement about what Bob says -- about the worth of McCormick's life is debated in the 28 comments that follow over at Creative Destruction. Instead, there's a brief exchange concluding, apparently, that the disability of McCormick has no bearing on the shortened sentence. And then animal rights is brought up, and, oh, go read the rest. The entire debate really is a good answer to the question "What would nondisabled privilege look like?"