Academia Routinely Dehumanizes Disabled People

Meghan Schrader

By Meghan Schader
Meghan is an instructor at E4 - University of Texas (Austin) and is a member of the EPC-USA board.  

I love a good philosophical discussion, but I am frustrated that academia has treated disabled human beings as walking moral conundrums instead of people. 

I think Alexander Raikin put this problem well when he posted on X,

“For all the talk about ‘cancel culture,’ if you're an academic, you can say whatever you want about people with disabilities. You can say that their lives aren't valuable, that being dead is an improvement. You won't be penalized for these views—it'll help you get published.”

Exactly. This pattern is a personal beserk button.

Now I come to my most recent foray into academia, a commentary I was invited to write for a prestigious academic journal’s special issue on “MAiD” and disability. I was told that the paper was enthusiastically accepted and later asked to make various adjustments. 

For nine months I worked diligently to carefully and open mindedly address each point, with input from the person who had asked me to write the commentary. Up to when I submitted the manuscript incorporating the second round of feedback, publication appeared likely.

But then I received notice that the editors didn’t want my commentary after all. 

On some level, I have to suck it up. Article rejections are part of academia. Nevertheless I think it’s worthwhile to examine the editors’ assertion that the final outcome occurred solely because editing my writing did not result in “changes to the style to better match the style of the other manuscripts in the special issue and the style of manuscripts in the journal in general” and had nothing to do with publication bias. 

I think the feedback I received complicates that conclusion. Regardless of their intent, the editors seemed to want me to use language and make statements that favor the “MAiD” movement’s ideology.

I know that this perception is influenced by my personal biases, but the second round of feedback I received strikes me as possibly being an example of the longstanding pattern of some powerful “MAiD” supporters being insincere when they say that they want to “have a discussion” about  “death with dignity.” They want a discussion, but only one where their ideology is cast in the best possible light and opponents are expected to make concessions that sanitize horrible bigotry. 

For instance, during the second round of feedback the lead editors wanted me to address disabled people who want “MAiD.” All I could offer was a more detailed version of the argument that I made in the first draft of the commentary and on this blog: I empathize with disabled people who would like to “use MAiD,” but the disabled proponents are in the minority and I think it’s common sense that their suicidal ideation/desire for autonomy should not be able to turn the rest of the disabled community into a killable caste. 

The editors also seemed to want me to make statements that I worried would imply that the disabled community is evenly divided on the issue of “MAiD,” which is one of the “MAiD” movement’s favorite canards. The  majority of the disability community opposes “MAiD” and has for decades. So, in addition providing an intersectional analysis of disabled people who do want “MAiD,” I added contextualized quotes from other, more accomplished disability justice opponents of “MAiD,” to establish that while not every disabled person opposes “MAiD,” my perspective is not unique, either. 

One of the editors suggested that I call Peter Singer’s assertion that raping some disabled people is acceptable “controversial.” I think they were ok with my proposed substitution of “callous,” but why has academia conditioned people to suggest adjectives like “controversial” when discussing raping disabled persons? The consensus among ethical people in our culture is that rape is abhorrent, not “controversial.” I think referring to the rape of a disabled person as  “controversial” reinforces our culture’s pattern of treating the horrible abuse of disabled persons as if it weren’t necessarily wrong, even if that wasn’t the editor’s intent. 

In addition to seemingly wanting me to imply that the disabled community is evenly divided on the issue of “MAiD” and refer to the rape of disabled people as “controversial,” the editors wanted me to say that killing disabled children with “MAiD” was hateful “in my opinion.” I added the phrase “in my opinion,”  but I also added contextualized quotes from other, more accomplished disability rights advocates who concur with that assessment. I worried that otherwise my commentary might suggest that my perspective on killing disabled children is unique and that such killings are something that 21st century people should agree to disagree about. 

That concession isn’t appropriate for a personal commentary. I’m a disabled disability justice advocate. Therefore I think that disabled people’s dignity demands that if a policy of killing  able-bodied children from other disenfranchised groups is considered hateful, killing disabled children be regarded as hateful.

Even if bias was not the intent, I am nonplussed by the sanitizing language the journal editors asked me to use in my discussion of raping and killing. I think academic and political debate is usually a very good thing, but there are limits to what responsible people should concede. 

Richard John Neuhaus remarked, “Thousands of medical ethicists and bioethicists, as they are called, professionally guide the unthinkable on its passage through the debatable on its way to becoming the justifiable until it is finally established as the unexceptionable.” 

Yes. So I did everything I could to respond eruditely  to my reviewer’s feedback without becoming part of that process. I am sorry that my commentary was not published by the prestigious journal, but at least I didn’t have to say that raping disabled people is “controversial” or that killing disabled children is only hateful “in my opinion.”

Academia’s insistence on treating disabled people like walking thought experiments is obnoxious;  rhetoric that promotes raping and killing disabled people is oppressive. However limited my own influence may be, that’s why I’ve written blogs and X threads that say, “Oh, you want to have a nice, polite discussion about killing disabled people, eh? Here’s a picture of your book in a toilet!” 

Disabled people aren’t “porn” for scholars’ intellectual vulgarity sessions. We are not obliged to accept abuse from academics who wish to debate the merits of raping and killing us at conferences in posh hotels. Not using disabled people’s personhood as an intellectual plaything is one of the least things society could do for people with disabilities.  

Author Note 1: For an incisive, more comprehensive commentary on resisting the “MAiD” movement’s framing in discussions about assisted suicide and eugenics, please read disability policy analyst Gabrielle Peters’s article “Acceding To MAiD Proponent’s Framing Excludes Abolition As a Potential Solution” in the American Journal of Bioethics. 

Author Note 2: For clarification of what I mean when I say that Peter Singer said that raping some disabled people is acceptable, read this blog post.