Saturday Slumgullion #29

First some new links regarding Ashley X:

"Straight on till mourning" by John Hockenberry at his place, The Blogenberry:

Disability has nothing to do with the morality of the Ashley Treatment. Parents of disabled or non disabled children are the people who bring them into the world and help them live their lives and grow up to be whatever it is they will be. While Ashley’s options as an adult are certainly limited because of her disability they were not predetermined until Ashley’s parents and doctors stepped in.

I am not going to argue that Ashley’s parents are immoral or unjustified in what they did. I will argue that they are no longer Ashley’s parents. Regardless of their love and affection for their daughter their decision to remove her breasts and uterus and maintain her in a state of pre-puberty is not a parental decision. It is more the kind of control one might enforce on a pet to manage the relationship. It is something a farmer managing the productivity of his or her operation would naturally enforce on livestock. This would be done humanely, morally, and no-doubt with considerable tender affection and love for the subjects. There would be no outcry and no controversy, yet no one would confuse these acts of husbandry as parenthood.

From Medill Reports, "Disability activists press 'Ashley Treatment' case with AMA"

"Medical ethics malfunction" by Reuben Apple at his blog Politics and the English Language:

When I first heard about this case, I sympathized more with Ashley's parents than with their daughter, maybe because I thought I had more in common with them. I could even have been persuaded that Ashley should be killed. I thought, mental development arrested at 3 months, she's nothing but a burden, even to herself. Then William Peace reminded me that, in the only way that matters here, I do not have any less in common with Ashley than with any other person: we’re both people. That is the critical point from which I saw that Ashley's dignity - because by extension the dignity of all disabled people and by further extension the dignity of all human beings - should be everyone's primary concern in this matter. Now I think that, if we let her, she might make a contribution to society that few others could.

Kestrell at The Blind Bookworm writes "Whats the story? Ashley X and the journalistic challenge of wirting about disability"

And other linky stuff:

More on hybrid cars and the dangers their quiet engines pose for blind pedestrians.

Newsday's Carl MacGowan on the latest testimony in the case of the deaf boy v. the school district refusing to allow his service dog in school.

From The Michigan Daily, veterans vow to sue if renovations to the Michigan Stadium do not comply with the ADA. More from The Detroit Free Press.

From MSNBC, "Woman in iron lung celebrates 60th birthday"

From the SFGate.com, Tom FitzGerald writes about Kevin Laue, a one-armed high-school basketball player, in "The shotblocker: Amador Valley's Laue intimidates despite disability"

From The Toronto Star, a report on 1,600 developmentally disabled folks institutionalized in nursing homes because Ontario doesn't know what else to do with them. Letters to the editor here. The main article quoted here:

The huge increase of nursing home beds in recent years produced, in some jurisdictions, an over-supply of beds, she says, so that funnelling the developmentally disabled there has helped keep the nursing homes lucrative and filled. She points out that nursing home beds are relatively cheap – cheaper than spaces in either group homes or regional centres – and many of the homes are for-profit enterprises.

Spindel discovered that people with developmental disabilities are, on average, 31 years younger than the general nursing home average age of 83. Some are as young as 18.

From the NYT, an article by Karen Olsson about a young woman and her two autistic brothers (This should be a permanent link):

Tarah Perry wishes her brothers would remember to put on deodorant. Other 16-year-olds, after all, don’t need to be reminded of that by their 14-year-old sister. Other families don’t keep a stick of Degree in the glove compartment to enforce deodorant compliance on the way to school in the morning. Granted, Justin and Jason are different from other brothers — they are autistic twins — and Tarah’s family is therefore different from other families, and generally speaking she is perfectly O.K. with that. It’s all she has ever known. But lately she has been fighting more with her brothers. They irritate her, she says. They stink. She tells them as much, and they squabble about it, as any siblings might — only when you’re 14 and your brothers are disabled and you don’t know whether they’ll ever make it on their own or whether you’ll be responsible for taking care of them, then even the little things take on greater weight. Because what Tarah also wishes is that her brothers will one day manage to hold jobs and find friends and live the kind of life that regular deodorant-wearing people live, or some semblance of it. And in the meantime, it would be nice if they didn’t smell up the car.

AP reporter Nancy Zuckerbrod writes about the No Child Left Behind Act, its effects on learning disabled children (and those learning English as a second language), and expected changes to the law.

Scott Rains at Rolling Rains offers the link to an extensive study on Hurricane Katrina and the disaster's impact on disabled people.

RighteousBabe at DailyKos writes about Ty Siegel, (the Iraq war vet whose wedding pics have made the net rounds recently,) disability politics, pride and identity, and liberals/Democrats. Hundreds of comments in response, too.

The NYT again. Aliyah Baruchin writes on "Battling Epilepsy, and Its Stigma"