Eugenics and Disabled Parents' Rights

I am very concerned by Robyn Powell's words: "there appears to be a growing trend toward sterilizing people with intellectual or psychiatric disabilities."

there appears to be a growing trend toward sterilizing people with intellectual or psychiatric disabilities.  - See more at: http://healthlawreporter.bbablogs.org/2014/09/06/delivery-room-courtroom-ensuring-rights-parents-disabilities/#sthash.XFS4fKJz.Dcxu0uAb.dpuf

there appears to be a growing trend toward sterilizing people with intellectual or psychiatric disabilities.  - See more at: http://healthlawreporter.bbablogs.org/2014/09/06/delivery-room-courtroom-ensuring-rights-parents-disabilities/#sthash.XFS4fKJz.Dcxu0uAb.dpuf

there appears to be a growing trend toward sterilizing people with intellectual or psychiatric disabilities.  - See more at: http://healthlawreporter.bbablogs.org/2014/09/06/delivery-room-courtroom-ensuring-rights-parents-disabilities/#sthash.XFS4fKJz.Dcxu0uAb.dpuf

there appears to be a growing trend toward sterilizing people with intellectual or psychiatric disabilities.  - See more at: http://healthlawreporter.bbablogs.org/2014/09/06/delivery-room-courtroom-ensuring-rights-parents-disabilities/#sthash.XFS4fKJz.Dcxu0uAb.dpuf

there appears to be a growing trend toward sterilizing people with intellectual or psychiatric disabilities.  - See more at: http://healthlawreporter.bbablogs.org/2014/09/06/delivery-room-courtroom-ensuring-rights-parents-disabilities/#sthash.XFS4fKJz.Dcxu0uAb.dpuf

there appears to be a growing trend toward sterilizing people with intellectual or psychiatric disabilities.  - See more at: http://healthlawreporter.bbablogs.org/2014/09/06/delivery-room-courtroom-ensuring-rights-parents-disabilities/#sthash.XFS4fKJz.Dcxu0uAb.dpuf

there appears to be a growing trend toward sterilizing people with intellectual or psychiatric disabilities.  - See more at: http://healthlawreporter.bbablogs.org/2014/09/06/delivery-room-courtroom-ensuring-rights-parents-disabilities/#sthash.XFS4fKJz.Dcxu0uAb.dpuf

I am going to block quote a post I wrote in July:

Robyn Powell, Attorney Advisor at the National Council on Disability, writes in “Can Parents Lose Custody Simply Because They Are Disabled?” that "removal rates where parents have a psychiatric disability have been found to be as high as 70 percent to 80 percent; where the parent has an intellectual disability, 40 percent to 80 percent." In addition, she writes, “parents who are deaf or blind report extremely high rates of child removal and loss of parental rights.”

We are no longer in the 1920s and 1930s, and the ingrained ableism still persists into the modern day. The statistics listed by Powell, and the countless cases in which children are removed from parents with disabilities, says among other things that:

• The disabled are not fit to bear children, nor raise them.
  
• People with disabilities should not have the same rights as non-disabled parents, because they are inherently less.
  
• Children need to be protected and raised away from people with disabilities.
  

Some people may protest, once the concept of eugenics is explained to them, that they’re not like that. They don’t support things like that. Yet by either failing to act in defense of, or supporting the removal of children from parents with disabilities, they are playing into the very legacy of eugenics.

Eugenics has been around too long. It needs to stop. Eugenic-based legal aspects are one of the policies that violate a human's rights so deeply that I find eugenicists unforgivable. I will fight eugenic policies til the day I die. And hopefully I can write things that people can keep fighting with after I’m gone.