AAPD Article on the "New Eugenics" and my thoughts on the UN Convention

This is a great piece by the folks at the American Association of People with Disabilities from the Washington Post. You must check it out...

"In its preamble, the recently unveiled U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities recognizes "the inherent dignity and worth and equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family as the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world."

We wonder what Oliver Wendell Holmes would have said about that.

This month marked the 80th anniversary of the disgraceful Supreme Court decision in Buck v. Bell, which upheld Virginia's involuntary sterilization laws. In his majority opinion, Holmes declared: "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind . . . Three generations of imbeciles is enough."

Although eugenics was eventually dismissed as "junk science," it didn't happen before states authorized more than 60,000 forcible sterilizations and segregated, institutionalized, and denied marriage and parental rights to those deemed "genetically unfit."...

The rest of the article is here: http://www.aapd.com/News/aapdinthe/070519wp.htm

Before you leave however, I am still confused as to why the U.S. refuses to sign the newly ratified UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Well, I'm not really that confused...the UN Convention elaborates protections for individuals with disabilities that go well beyond the protections available in the U.S. under ADA, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, IDEA and other disability rights policies. I would imagine that the U.S. is reticent to agree to abide by the UN Convention because it will require some pretty dramatic shifts in the policies currently in place in the U.S. But, is that such a bad thing? A costly thing perhaps, but definitely not a bad thing.

I still think that it's ironic that we "advertise" our country as the bastion of freedom, liberty, and democracy, but we have some of the most backwards disability rights, immigration, healthcare, and education policies in the world........(I'd better stop before I get in trouble).