Link: Remembering the Holocaust

[davidgillon]

It's often forgotten, or was never learnt, that disabled people were the first group singled out for systematic killing during the Holocaust in Aktion T4, that's something we should never allow ourselves to forget. I was trying to think of something appropriate to write, but Katharine Quarmby has saved me the effort by putting up the section of her book Scapegoat that discusses the T4 programme as her blog post for today:

Remembering the Holocaust – and the disabled victims who died in the T4 programme

(BTW, Scapegoat: why we are failing disabled people (Portobello, 2011), is an absolutely fantastic, if horrendously chilling, study of disability hate crime in the UK).

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

I had the chance to talk about some medical ethics with a doctor studying to be an ethicist and we couldn't even agree on how to communicate. I'm sure she was as frustrated as I was, but i was also scared, for the reasons you mention.

[davidgillon]

When a couple of Italian-Australian medical ethicists published a paper a couple of years ago arguing for post-natal abortion of disabled babies (yes, you read that right, post-natal), I spent several weeks trying to engage with medical ethicists on the forum of their major journal. I couldn't even get them to agree disabled people had a right to be concerned, while their editor emeritus (Reverend Doctor Professor so and so - yes, really!) put up a post saying if disabled people were so concerned then he was sure one of them was quite capable of writing a scholarly refutation and submitting it to the journal for peer review. They quite literally didn't have a clue they were doing anything wrong, or of the very real consequences for disabled people.

[jesse_the_k]

!!!!!! Yipes.

At the 2014 Society for Disability Studies conference there were a handful of ethicists (I hope they were trying to harmonize dis studies and medicine, but that's a very hard row to hoe). All the ethicists I've heard about, seen on TV, or locally (we're a hotbed because our Uni's been a transplant center for a long time) appear able-bodied, and certainly don't talk about a disability standpoint. Well, no, Eva Kittay is the parent of someone with an intellectual disability, but she's hardly mainstream ethics.

It's just horrifying to think that people whose decisions have such an impact on our lives don't know shit about our lives.