Tag: disability representation

State of California flag on a flagpole.

California’s Reproductive Freedom Efforts Should Meaningfully Include People With Disabilities

Joelle Boxer 1 Comment

By Joelle Boxer

Last month, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a package of nine reproductive health care bills, following the passage of fifteen such bills in 2022. While the state should be lauded for its efforts, it has come up short. Recent legislation largely excludes up to 25% of the adult population: Californians with disabilities.

People with disabilities in the U.S. experience wide disparities in accessing reproductive health care, rooted in a long history of oppressive reproductive control. California should take action now to address these disparities and fulfil its goal of becoming a “reproductive freedom state” for all.

This article will examine recent movement on reproductive health care legislation in California, explain its failure to meet the needs of Californians with disabilities, and suggest a path forward in line with principles of disability reproductive justice.

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line drawing of computers, tablets, and televisions.

Autistic Screen Time: Swipe Left on Stigma

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Maxfield Sparrow

I am an autistic person who has been using the internet as a social prosthetic device since 1983. I was born in 1967 and began therapy in 1972, so the iPad didn’t exist and the only screen time parents worried about was the five channels of broadcast television available twenty hours a day. TV was fine, but my real passion was books. I was hyperlexic and from a very early age I had an unquenchable thirst for written language. My obsession with reading was considered pathological, and adults took my books away to try to force me to socialize with other children instead.

It didn’t work. But it is sadly common that those of us with developmental disabilities are held to higher standards than everyone else. As children, once we are identified, everything about us is scrutinized. Well-meaning adults, fearing for our future, hold us to higher standards of everything from politeness to academic discipline to the age-appropriateness of our interests to the ways we move through the world. We’re not allowed to “get away with” the things non-disabled kids do every day.

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Cover image of Ashley Shew's book, Against Technoableism.

Symposium Introduction: Addressing Technoableism: Reforming Infrastructure and Disability Representation

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Ashley Shew

Far too often, when people write and talk about technology and disability, stories are deeply shaped by ableism. Often when devices are painted as “solving the problem of disability” or “empowering disabled people,” they suggest that being disabled is itself a problem, and that people should try to be as nondisabled as possible. But pretending to be nondisabled is not a great way to live — to be in hiding or denial, to not give your body and mind the rest they deserve, to hurt yourself trying to live up to expectations and infrastructure sometimes literally designed to keep you out. Technology itself gets painted as heroic and important — and, please, investors, throw more money at the tech industry — when any disability is mentioned. Disability is often appealed to as a justification for technological development, and as a moral imperative toward investment in technological research. This is technoableism as I describe it in my book, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement. 

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