Adrienne Asch

Women with disabilities: Essays in psychology, culture, and politics.

1. On Embodiment: A Case Study of Congenital Limb Deficiency in - American Culture - Gelya Frank 2. Sex Roles and Culture: Social and Personal Reactions to Breast Cancer - Beth E. Meyerowitz. Shelley Chaiken, and Laura K. Clark 3. In Search of a Heroine: Images of Women with Disabilities in Fiction and Drama - Deborah Kent 4. The Construction of Gender and Disability in Early Attachment - Adrienne Harris and Dana Wideman 5. Daughters with Disabilities: Defective Women or Minority Women? - Harilyn Rousso 6. Friendship and Fairness: How Disability Affects Friendship Between Women - Berenice Fisher and Roberta Galler 7. Disability and Ethnicity in Conflict: A Study in Transformation - Marilynn J. Phillips 8. Never-Married Old Women and Disability: A Majority Experience - Barbara Levy Simon 9. Women, Work, and Disability: Opportunities and Challenges - Nancy Felipe Russo and Mary A. Jansen 10. Disabled Women and Public Policies for Income Support - Nancy R. Mudrick 11. Autonomy as a Different Voice: Women, Disabilities, and Decision Making - Joanna K. Weinberg 12. Shared Dreams: A Left Perspective on Disability Rights and Reproductive Rights - Adrienne Asch and Michelle Fine 13. Smashing Icons: Disabled Women and the Disability and Womens Movements - Marian Blackwell-Stratton, Mary Lou Breslin, and Arlene Byrnne Mayerson Epilogue: Research and Politics to Come - Adrienne Asch and Michelle Fine

Prenatal diagnosis and selective abortion: a challenge to practice and policy.

Professionals should reexamine negative assumptions about the quality of life with prenatally detectable impairments and should reform clinical practice and public policy to improve informed decision making and genuine reproductive choice. Current data on children and families affected by disabilities indicate that disability does not preclude a satisfying life. Many problems attributed to the existence of a disability actually stem from inadequate social arrangements that public health professionals should work to change. This article assumes a pro-choice perspective but suggests that unreflective uses of prenatal testing could diminish, rather than expand, womens choices. This critique challenges the view of disability that lies behind the social endorsement of such testing and the conviction that women will or should end their pregnancies if they discover that the fetus has a disabling trait.

Reproductive Technology and Disability

How do the new reproductive technologies affect people with disabilities? Answering this question, taking into account current and future generations of disabled women, men, and children requires putting a biological fact, impairment or disability, in a social context. In a different society than ours, the meaning of the new technologies for people with disabilities could resemble that for people without disabilities. In other words, any special implications for people with disabilities stem primarily, though not exclusively, from their position as the subjects of deep-rooted ambivalence on the part of the nondisabled population. Below, I will sketch out the social context for disability in our society and then discuss from the perspective of disability rights the six areas of reproductive concerns featured in other segments of this book: prenatal screening, time limits on abortion, fetus as patient, reproductive hazards in the workplace, alternative modes of reproduction, and interference with reproductive choice.

Distracted by Disability

People with disabilities use more medical care and see health professionals more often than do those of the same age, ethnic group, or economic class who do not have impairments. An indisputable medical goal is “preventing, ameliorating, or curing disease and its associated effects of suffering and disability, and thereby restoring, or preventing the loss of, normal function or of life.”

Diagnóstico pré-natal e aborto seletivo: um desafio à prática e às políticas

Este artigo defende o argumento de que a popularizacao do aborto seletivo com as modernas tecnicas de diagnostico pre-natal representa um risco a integridade moral dos deficientes, caso ele nao seja acompanhado de uma intensificacao das politicas de bem-estar para as pessoas portadoras de deficiencia.

Reply to Nelson

We are gratified by Nelsons response to our commentary. It shows, for the first time, an appreciation of the distinctive character of our criticism of individual decisions to test and terminate for fetal impairment. Although we still find much to disagree with in Nelsons characterization and critique of our views, he has given us a welcome opportunity to clarify and develop them.

Investigation and Enforcement of a Disability Discrimination Statute: Complaints of Employment Discrimination Filed in New York State

This paper presents an analysis of 7,189 complaints of disabilitybased discrimination in employment filed with New York State and open between 1984-1994. The characteristics of the complainants, the employers, the complaints, and the resolutions are presented. The data show that the majority of disability discrimination complainants were not persons seeking jobs, but those who had jobs or were terminated from jobs. Approximately 40% of cases closed with a positive outcome for the complainant, with no discernible differences by type of disability. The New York State data are of interest not only because they indicate how a state civil rights law for disability operated before the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), but because they can suggest what the experience and the challenges may be in the enforcement of the ADA over time.

Prenatal Diagnosis and Selective Abortion: A Challenge to Practice and Policy

Professionals should reexamine negative assumptions about the quality of life with prenatally detectable impairments and should reform clinical practice and public policy to improve informed decision making and genuine reproductive choice. Current data on children and families affected by disabilities indicate that disability does not preclude a satisfying life. Many problems attributed to the existence of a disability actually stem from inadequate social arrangements that public health professionals should work to change. This article assumes a pro-choice perspective but suggests that unreflective uses of prenatal testing could diminish, rather than expand, womens choices. This critique challenges the view of disability that lies behind the social endorsement of such testing and the conviction that women will or should end their pregnancies if they discover that the fetus has a disabling trait.