Posted on 10/29/2003 4:23:59 PM PST by nickcarraway
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Once upon a time, I believed being a feminist meant never having to say, "I agree with Randall Terry."
Times change.
As a woman with a disability and a progressive, I have never felt so alone as I have this week following the mainstream media's portrayal of the so-called right-to-die case in Florida. During a week of e-mails from otherwise progressive women's rights organizations about the assault on abortion rights, I have heard nothing about this ongoing assault on the life of a woman who is severely disabled. Not terminal, dying, or on her deathbed. Disabled. I understand the critical difference between dying and disability. Many others do not.
For some reason, women who ordinarily approach the news with a skeptical eye - sometimes even a jaundiced eye - have accepted the opinion of the mainstream media without even wondering whether they are getting a biased story. The New York Times editorial page, slammed by conservatives as too liberal, ran an editorial on October 22 calling for Schiavo's right to be starved to death in the name of bodily integrity. I'm sitting here, waiting, waiting -- waiting for a word from NOW or any women's organization, to come join me in questioning how to define bodily integrity. I haven't heard from any nondisabled women who call themselves progressive. This isolation leaves me in a bit of an ideological pickle, a pickle that looks like Randall Terry. I don't particularly enjoy linking arms with Randall Terry but that's politics. I'll get over it. Since I can do that, I am officially asking women who generally "get it" to get over their tizzy about what-if-it-happened-to-me. Start listening to women and men with disabilities. Notice that 14 disability rights organizations signed briefs in support of Schiavo. Show some respect to the activists with disabilities who did what I shrink from: Hang out with the religious right if it meant saving the life of a woman with a disability.
I suspect most women, however enlightened, do not accept Terri Schiavo is a woman. Not really. Her medical condition too easily eclipses her humanity. I can certainly understand (and share) the deep emotions and fears this case raises. What I cannot understand is the silence. The unwillingness of nondisabled women to try to see beyond their own narrow perspective on what constitutes a "meaningful life." So much for that cornerstone of the women's movement, prizing the voice of the person with the experience. Don't ask me, a woman who's been disabled all of her life. By all means, ask a doctor.
I'm waiting to hear from long-time feminists who told male doctors that radical mastectomies weren't the answer to every lump, that hysterectomies weren't the cure for the common cold; who told male police officers that no means no, even when it isn't spelled out in a contract.
I'm waiting to find out to know why they're so quiet now, the women who kept hammering the message that women's lives are valuable even when they aren't gestating a child, pleasing a man, or wrapped in skin of a certain color. Is it because you see Schiavo less as a woman and more as a disability?
I've heard women I respect recently discuss why the women's movement has lost so much support, and is so dismissed by the women and girls who have benefited from the gains it achieved. There were theories and strategies for engaging younger women and re-establishing connections with other generations. After watching the collective failure of the women's movement to respond this week to the Schiavo case, I have a new theory. The women's movement has no guts. Literally. I haven't heard a message from any women's rights organization lately that in any way equals the instinctive twist in the gut that comes with learning about Terry Schiavo. That twist in the gut should be a call to action.
In my opinion, the women's movement doesn't know how to be revolutionary anymore. Even worse, they are ignoring the connection between stigma, silence and oppression. Where once it taught us to say "vagina," now it gets stuck on "poop." Women who understand the political importance of talking openly about menstruation start looking at the floor when incontinence comes up. Women who comfortably disclose their race, age, and sexual orientation at work hide their psychiatric medication. Women who understand all other forms of diversity roll their eyes when other women ask them to not wear perfume.
Disability rights issues could redefine the women's movement. If the women's movement avoids the Schiavo case, it will be choosing not to grapple with the issues that will be facing more and more women in the coming years. They are issues of dependence and control, the classics of the women's movement that, unfortunately, never go out of style. The issues in the Schiavo case are the headlights of the car speeding right at every older woman, every chronically ill woman, every woman with a disability in this country. You don't have to tell me it's scary as hell to be standing in the middle of that dark road. The only way to survive it is to move fast. But if we're going to move fast, we have to have a clear sense of direction and purpose. The women's movement could have a needle-sharp point; the point would prick some but it would also pierce the complacency that is the real enemy of change.
What point could cut through the current apathy about women's lives faster than hearing a woman with a disability say, "Incontinence is not all incongruous with my having a dignified, meaningful life,"? Is it possible not to respond, even if all you do is mutter, "Oh my god, I can't believe she just said that,"? I dare you to find a more daring example of self-worth than a woman telling the world she deserves what the dainty call "help with personal hygiene." Women don't have to agree on everything -- women with disabilities certainly don't. But what the women's movement would gain from embracing disability rights is a vanguard. It would have a new source of leadership.
The battles are huge. They include access to affordable healthcare, long-term community-based care and living wages for the workers (a largely female population) who provide personal assistance. We will be fighting the nursing-home industry, big pharma, HMOs, and corporations that pollute the environment. We will be up against the same old bullies like abusive families, autocratic doctors and discriminatory employers. We may not have traditional allies such as the ACLU and we may have unexpected allies in the religious right. Will that stop the women's movement? No! Because the women's movement will know that its own progress is doomed if it fails to include women with disabilities. If it sacrifices Terri Schiavo because being her ally is, regretfully, beyond their scope at this time.
Each wave of the women's movement has asked the impossible, and in so doing, galvanized huge numbers of women. Speaking the unspeakable, asking for the moon, these are what the women's movement did once upon a time. They did it because women's lives were at stake. Women's lives are still at stake. Terri Schiavo is a woman, remember? That's all that matters. If denying equal protection under the law to women with disabilities through right to die laws isn't "violence against women" just what is?
Ingrid Tischer lives in San Francisco.
Well, maybe the feminists are being true to themselves after all. They won't defend helpless babies, so why should they worry about helpless disabled women? Maybe they just think Terry is some sort of a plant.
If the person can't make this choice, then the law should always "err" on the side of life.
Michael Schiavo is a corrupt twit who stands to benefit by his wife's death. His attorney is a pro-death freak who is giving the entire "hospice" concept a bad name. Neither of these people should have anything to do with this decision - but they are the ones who control it.
I am hoping that what will come out of this is a system of local (state) laws weighted on the side of life. Did anybody hear the woman interviewed on NPR, of all places, who had been in a "vegetative state" for years but could hear them discussing how to kill her? Every time she tried to speak or wave her arms, they announced that she was having random nervous impulses and gave her drugs to quiet her down. And then one day she woke up - fortunately just before they were about to kill her.
Mistakes are always made, but they should be made on the side of life.
Those gray haired women who were at the forefront of the 'women's movement' are going to be hit square in the face with this issue at a point in the very near future. Maybe when it truly affects them, they'll start talking about it. Right now, I suspect that they don't want to be anywhere near this issue because there are too many conservative folks lined up on the side of Terry Schiavo. The feminazis certainly don't want to rub elbows with the likes of Randall Terry.
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