Category Archives: reproductive justice

Law & Order: “Dignity”, Worth, and the Medical Model of Disability

As a feminist, I am pro-choice. Abortion should be safe, legal, and accessible.

As a feminist, I look at more than whether single, individual women have access to abortion. There is a much broader reproductive justice framework that must be scrutinised, critiqued and repaired so that all women have access to informed, supported reproductive choices.

Women who have been denied informed, supported reproductive choices in the past include more than the wealthy, non-disabled white women who dominate pro-choice conversations. Marginalised groups are as likely to be fighting for their right to reproduce as their right not to – people of colour, trans people, lesbians, and of course women with disabilities, who have been denied sex education and forcibly subjected to contraception and sterilisation for centuries.

To that list of marginalised groups, of people who are often denied truly informed and supported choices, we can perhaps add – people pregnant with fetuses who may have a prenatal diagnosis of a disability.

As a feminist, I believe that we can have the abortion-rights conversation without marginalising, othering, and disparaging people with disabilities. I believe we can talk about abortion within that broader framework of reproductive justice, and that we can confront the ableism that creeps into some abortion-rights conversations head-on. This takes effort; we must think clearly, write carefully, read closely.

Yes, some forced-birthers will try to appropriate our words for their own ends. We need to remember that they are responsible for their own misreadings and misrepresentations, not us. We need to not let their twisted, misogynist agendas control what we say. They must not stop us from speaking out.

Law & Order, “Dignity”

So, guess what I did today? I swallowed my intense dislike of popular TV crimeporn show Law & Order, and watched episode 20×05, “Dignity”, in which a bloke murders a doctor who provides abortion services, to “save” his daughter’s fetus, diagnosed prenatally with Ehlers Danlos syndrome.

Before we start, a little background on Ehlers Danlos syndrome (EDS). EDS is not one condition; it is a heterogeneous group of conditions caused by differences in genes coding for collagen proteins. Collagen is a key ingredient in all connective tissue, including skin and ligaments. The commonest EDS types manifest primarily as joint hypermobility or as very elastic skin. EDS often goes undiagnosed until adulthood, or completely undiagnosed throughout life.

There is a very, very rare variety of EDS called dermatosparaxis which involvs fragile, floppy skin and easy bruising; there have been ten published case reports of this variety worldwide. Within that group, the severity is still heterogeneous – check out this blog Sense and Disability, by a woman with dermatosparaxis who has studied at Oxford and backpacked through Europe.

Let’s have a look at the episode. I’m not going to go into a detailed recap; you can check one out here at All Things Law & Order: “Law & Order “Dignity” Recap & Review”. The case is a ripped-from-the-headlines story with many details closely resembling the terroristic murder of Dr George Tiller, one of a half-handful of late term abortion providers in the USA. The show adds a number of details that appear designed to showcase forced-birther ideas, such as the invented detail that the slain doctor had in the past murdered a live newborn. The murderer’s defence argument centres around the idea that he is trying to save a fetus from the abortion that his daughter has scheduled.

The fetus in question has apparently been diagnosed with Ehlers Danlos syndrome (EDS). At first, oddly, we’re told that it has “Fragile Skin Disease”, which typically refers to a completely different set of keratin-related conditions, epidermolysis bullosa. The show does not elaborate on how the EDS was supposedly detected (prenatal gene testing is not routine), or the fact that EDS is heterogeneous and that people with EDS vary widely in phenotype, or, well, any other facts, really. We just get this:

[clips, transcripts and a lot more discussion are below the cut]

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