By Hannah Rahim
New technologies are increasing the accessibility of polygenic embryo screening, which can assess the likelihood of an embryo developing polygenic diseases (e.g., diabetes, schizophrenia) or provide insight into certain polygenic traits (e.g., height, intelligence). This procedure has many complex clinical, social, and ethical implications, but is currently unregulated in the U.S.
By Hannah Rahim
Luck egalitarianism is a theory of political philosophy that provides that inequalities resulting from an individual’s informed choices are just and need not be reduced, whereas inequalities resulting from circumstances over which an individual has no control are unjust and should be reduced. The application of luck egalitarianism to health inequalities has some value when allocating health care resources, but it often conceptualizes health too narrowly and risks exacerbating existing unjust disparities. If luck egalitarianism is to be applied in developing health care policy, it must only be used in clearly defined circumstances and with a holistic approach.
By Lucas Taylor
Surrogacy, the practice in which one party (the surrogate) gestates a fetus on behalf of another pair/person (the intended parent/s or IPs), has sparked academic debates regarding gender equality and bodily integrity in the face of both commercial and altruistic agreements. I re-engage with this topic by challenging how the capacity of the surrogate to choose may be restricted under English and Welsh law. This post does not seek to argue against the practice of altruistic surrogacy. Instead, it seeks to highlight, through the lens of Social Reproduction Theory, that central to the legal framework is a highly gendered devaluation of labor which undermines the potential for surrogates to fully exercise choice in relation to their gestational labor.
By Giulia Cavaliere
Should U.K. employers be required to make reasonable adjustments for women who are struggling to conceive and who are going through fertility treatment?
This blog seeks to answer this question. Before getting to that, I will say a few words about my views concerning infertility and the public provision of fertility treatment.
By David Liebmann
Children starting kindergarten in 2023 will be 32 years old in 2050, the year the Paris Climate Accord signatories agreed to reach net zero carbon emissions. Those 32-year-olds will have grown up with signs of climate change appearing everywhere around them. They must learn enough in school about the changing global environment to lead themselves and the next generation into a livable future. This education should also incorporate teaching about disability and the disparate impacts of climate change on people with disabilities.
By Nate Holdren
Last week, David Leonhardt took to the pages of the New York Times to celebrate the latest COVID death figures, which he claims mean the U.S. is no longer in a pandemic, because there are no more “excess deaths.”
The hunger for good news is, of course, understandable amid this ongoing nightmare. But to respond to death with “smile everyone, it could have been more deaths!” is grotesque because of the disrespect to the dead and those most affected by the deaths.
It also lets the powerful off the hook, which is Leonhardt’s primary motivation, I assume. In other words, looking for good news is a political position.
By Elisavet Athanasia Alexiadou
States have a human rights obligation to promote the full, meaningful, and informed participation of persons with disabilities in the context of policy-making and decision-making processes about climate change.
This essay seeks to explain the basis for this obligation, outline its scope, and elucidate how states can ensure its fulfillment.
By Rafaello Adler-Abramo
Incorporating disability issues into general resilience planning is not only a life-saving necessity, but also a timely opportunity for broader disability inclusion.
Resilience planning is currently expanding and often well-funded. It is expected to vary by locale and populations, so differing needs are assumed. Additionally, much resilience planning is being developed de novo, possibly allowing easier incorporation of disability needs in primary planning, rather than being relegated to “special needs” addenda. This strategy may represent a plausible on-ramp for mainstream incorporation of Disability needs and knowledge.
Recently, I successfully advocated for the incorporation of persons with disabilities’ (PWD) needs into a Massachusetts state-facilitated municipal resilience planning program, in time for their five-year update. While planners’ guidance previously urged attention to needs of numerous groups identified as experiencing heightened vulnerability, PWDs’ specific needs had not yet been included.
By Sarah Bell
When considered in climate policy, disabled people are typically homogenized as climate “victims;” a framing that does little to address the social or political conditions that create these circumstances or to recognize the potential contributions of disabled people as knowledgeable agents of change.
This piece highlights the failure to recognize the knowledges of disabled people as a form of epistemic injustice, whereby the capacity of disabled people as knowers or “epistemic agents” that produce, use and/or transmit knowledge is repeatedly misrecognized or undermined.
By Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant
Over the course of the pandemic it has been popular to claim that we have “learned lessons from COVID,” as though this plague has spurred a revolution in how we treat illness, debility, and death under capitalism.
Management consulting firm McKinsey, for example, writes that COVID has taught us that “infectious diseases are a whole-of-society issue.” A Yale Medicine bulletin tells us that we successfully learned “everyone is not treated equally, especially in a pandemic.” These bromides reflect the Biden administration’s evaluation of its own efforts; a recent White House report professes to have “successfully put equity at the center of a public health response for the first time in the nation’s history.”
We have learned nothing from COVID. The ongoing death, debility, disability, and immiseration of the pandemic are testament only to a failed political economy that pretends at magnanimity.