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http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/does-a-disability-necessarily-make-you-worse-off-1.2895276 Yes, disability often involves some losses and hardships, but it involves many other things as well,” says Elizabeth Barnes, author of ‘The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability’ ‘Being disabled is a way of being a minority,’ says philosopher Elizabeth Barnes disability is generally thought of in the negative. The very word tends to conjure up a lack of something, a disadvantage or a hardship. But this needn’t be the case, and our first impressions can sometimes blind us to the unique qualities, talents and insights of people with disabilities. More than that, we tend to see disability as a “bad” difference to the norm, whereas it could instead be seen as a “mere” difference, says philosopher and author Elizabeth Barnes. “Being disabled is a way of being a minority with respect to one’s body, just as being gay is a way of being a minority with respect to sexuality. It is something that makes you different from the majority, but that difference isn’t by itself a bad thing,” she writes in a perspective-altering new book, The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability. Barnes herself has a disability – Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a collection of tissue disorders – which gives her a special insight on the issue. She says: “A lot of the difficulties about being disabled, in many cases, aren’t inevitable. They’re the result of lack of accessibility, accommodation, and social support for disabled people.” Thus, she advances the arresting idea: “Being disabled is not something that by itself or intrinsically makes you worse off.” People might find it hard to accept that disability is a “mere” difference rather than a “bad” difference. How do you justify the claim? “Yes, disability often involves some losses and hardships, but it involves many other things as well. “There’s a disability activist and storyteller named Kim Kilpatrick who talks about her experience of being blind, and one of the things she emphasises is that, for her, being blind isn’t just not being able it see: it’s also not being able to stereotype and judge people based on what they look like; it’s having no sense of self-consciousness about her appearance or sense of what she, as a woman, ‘ought’ to look like, and so on... “There are many things about being disabled that a lot of disabled people value. “I like to make the analogy to being female. Having a female body is complicated, and there’s some stuff about it that I don’t like. Some of that is due to sexism, but some of it is just the reality of living in a body that menstruates and can get pregnant and is subject to various hormonal vagaries. But as much as those things can be difficult, there’s also so much that’s wonderful and valuable about being female.” How would you categorise a disability that is likely to shorten your lifespan? Surely, that would be a “bad” difference? “I think we can distinguish between calling a disability ‘mere’ difference and calling every single aspect of that disability ‘mere’ difference. This can be tricky for people to understand, I think, because we tend to think of disability as just a collection of symptoms, rather than a complicated relationship between a person’s body and the society they inhabit. “Laura Hershey was a disability-rights activist who was adamant that the best thing for disabled people was better access to employment, assistive technology, health insurance, etc rather than the search for ‘cures’. She argued that focus on cures is an apolitical solution to a fundamentally political problem: that our society isn’t really set up to accommodate a wide range of bodies, including disabled people, elderly people, pregnant women, and so on. “I think we can say that for Hershey, there might be aspects of her disability – including reduced lifespan – which were ‘bad’ difference, even though her overall experience of disability was something she valued deeply, and did not consider ‘bad’ difference.” What are the implications of your argument for debates on abortion? It has been claimed, famously by geneticist Richard Dawkins, that knowingly bringing a severely disabled child into the world is immoral “Some people think that you are obligated not to bring a disabled child into existence if you can, and frankly I think that’s nothing more than rank prejudice. “There is so much evidence – both from hedonic psychology and from the vibrant and growing disability-rights community – that disabled people lead rich, wonderful lives and do not, in general, rate their quality of life as lower than nondisabled people – although studies show that nondisabled people typically assume, falsely, that disabled are not as happy or satisfied as nondisabled people. “But let’s leave aside the issue of whether anyone is obligated to terminate a pregnancy. The trickier cases are not claims of obligation but rather claims of permissibility. It’s not uncommon, for example, for a woman to choose to terminate a pregnancy because she discovers that her child, if brought to term, would be disabled. “I’m hesitant to say anything general about such cases, because there are so many factors – financial stability, social support, etc – that might be in play, and because in general I think we spend too much timing telling women what they should or shouldn’t do with their reproductive choices. But I do think that if someone chooses to terminate a pregnancy simply because they assume that a disabled child will not have a good life, or simply because they prefer to have a nondisabled child, it’s not unreasonable to view that choice as rooted in prejudice and misunderstanding of what disabled people’s lives can be like.”