What Makes a woman a woman? A person a person?
October 7, 2007
Via Feminist Response in Disability Activism (FRIDA) and BrownFemiPower:
In essence, Katie’s mother and mother’s partner are her primary caregivers and to protect Katie from the “indignity” of having a period, Katie’s mom wants her daughter to have a hysterectomy. Katie is not judged able to communicate for herself. Hmm, doesn’t this sound familiar? Where have we heard this before? —FRIDA
Katie Thorpe, a 15 y/o girl living in England, now faces the possibility of having Ashley X type treatments (hormones, hysterectomies, etc to stop menustration and the possibility of having children) so that it will be easier to take care of her. Because she has CP and learning disabilities, she is having no say over her body.
What’s most frusterating about this is that A.) people are once again pitting the problem on the person’s disability, B.) Ashley X was a horrible horrible injustice but many parents saw it/are seeing it as a viable option, C.) the media and public’s automatic sympathy and support for this, and D.) the fact that we live in a world where if you have a disability (and particularly, are a woman), being institutionalized, murdered, or having body parts removed is seen as a GOOD solution, rather than home-based services and a more accessible society.
How can we organize around this, people? Please let me know if you post about this so we can keep all the responses together.
—edit—
In addition to the list of bloggers that Penny at Disability Studies Temple University has going, there is a discussion on Feminste and the BBC OUCH forums.
Entry Filed under: activism, disability. .
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Just your everyday queer disabled Corean girl living in the South... I admit to being a 
1.
bint alshamsa | October 8, 2007 at 4:23 am
Why, oh why, did I have to see this at three o’clock in the morning? Now I’m going to have to stay up and blog about this. I’m effing furious about this!
2.
Ravenmn | October 8, 2007 at 8:33 am
Oh, crap. Definitely need to blog on this. Thanks for bring it up!
3.
shiva | October 8, 2007 at 4:02 pm
Thanks for blogging about this Stacey. I was thinking i was the only disability blogger who had…
There’s also a discussion going on about it on the BBC Ouch message board: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbouch/F2322273
Thankfully there seem to be less pro-sterilisation posters there than there were at the time of the Ashley case…
4.
Pinky Bear | October 9, 2007 at 12:34 pm
It makes the mind reel about how parents are determined to dehumanized their own children for Nazi-like Experiments rather than open their eyes and see that there are disabled people out there in the world. I wonder if they would castrate a little boy that way. I don’t want to say, Hmmm, just yet. They might.
5.
Women of Color Blog &raqu&hellip | October 10, 2007 at 9:41 am
[...] at 06:41 am | Tagged as: Uncategorized Can one more person please tell me how it’s ok to sterilize (through a hysterectomy no less) a 15 year old disabled girl because someday she will be institutionalized, which means someday she will be raped which means [...]
6.
Cilla | October 11, 2007 at 3:58 pm
This case scares the hell out of me and brings me to tears. I just posted about it too.
Cilla
aka Big Noise