Warning: Offsite links are not safe spaces. Articles and comments in the links may contain ableist language of varying intensity. *Chicago Tribune: Disabled mom fighting to keep her son Can a quadriplegic woman be a good parent? Her ex-boyfriend filed a custody suit that says no. In September, Trais sued O’Neill for full custody, charging that his ...

* NRC Handelsblad: Disabled poster boy banned from rail stations Not Normal, an art-exhibition focussed on the position of disabled people in society, which opened in Amsterdam on Wednesday has immediately sparked controversy. The exhibition features pieces by 80 visual artists, whose work all evokes the same question: what constitutes normality? And who decides what ...

Brittany Murphy died today. It took exactly five seconds for the speculation to start up about why she would die of cardiac arrest at the tender age of 32, and not quite double that for the snarky comments to seep out of the woodwork. Because certainly if she had an existing heart condition we all would ...

Oh yay! I missed this earlier in the week, but The 61st Disability Blog Carnival is up at Writing Mental Illness! As a writer who helps others write about their experiences with mental illness I’ve thought long and hard about what it means to tell about disability. Because there are many facets (many ways to ...

This is our weekly Chatterday! open thread. Use this open thread to talk amongst yourselves: feel free to share a link, have a vent, or spread some joy. What have you been reading or watching lately (remembering spoiler warnings)? What are you proud of this week? What’s made your teeth itch? What’s going on in ...

* Boston.com’s The Big Picture, 2009 in Photos: Photo shows Wadee Daoud, a five-year-old Palestinian boy with a visual impairment, at the Helen Keller Center for blind and visually impaired children in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina, September 10, 2009. Wadee is reacting to light after a teacher opened window blinds. He is wearing ...

A periodic feature in which we highlight some of the more ableist posts and comments in the blogosphere – the things that made us throw up our hands and ask “FOR CEREAL???” * Today’s edition: a post at Jezebel titled “Woman, Go Take Your Pills!”: Schoolgirls Respond To Samantha Bee’s Christmas Conspiracies. Which, already – are ...

I read a blog post recently by a woman with muscular dystrophy and her experiences going out to eat in restaurants. The author mentioned how wait staff rarely give her a menu, or give her a children’s menu instead of the standard menu. When this happens, she often just looks on with her mom’s menu ...

* Sydney Morning Herald: Blind student tops HSC subject Ria, a blind student who topped NSW in Indonesian Background Speakers, only migrated to Australia from its northern neighbour in 2007. Unable to see since she was five, the student from Sydney’s Open High School has been proficient in Indonesian braille for many years. But after moving to Australia, ...

When he went in for the ultrasound on his neck… Oh, gosh, where do I begin? With the wheelchair inaccessible waiting room (you can wait in the hall!), or the refusal to allow Don’s wheelchair to even be in the room when he was being examined? As though able-bodied people are asked all ...