Recently in Disability Rights Category

White Dude Knows Best! Above: Men who want to control the bodies of women they deem unfit mothers. Louisiana state Rep. John LaBruzzo (left) and Texas state District Judge Charlie Baird (right).

It's been quite a week for government violation of the bodily integrity of poor women and women of color. First, there was the judge in Texas who set "not having children" as a condition of a woman's parole. (I just linked in the WFR on Sunday, but Cara discussed it at length. Go read her post.)

And today, via several readers, comes the news that John LaBruzzo, a state legislator from Louisiana, wants to pay low-income women $1,000 apiece to get sterilized. Everything about this is so incredibly offensive, I don't know quite where to begin. Let's start with a quote from LaBruzzo:

"We're on a train headed to the future and there's a bridge out, " LaBruzzo said of what he suspects are dangerous demographic trends. "And nobody wants to talk about it."

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Low-income women having children is a "dangerous demographic trend"?! Sounds like the recent round of racist propaganda we saw related to the "Demographic Winter" movie. (Film summary: You should be panicked because brown people are reproducing at faster rates than white people.) But LaBruzzo protests that he is not a racist -- he's a problem-solver!

LaBruzzo said other, mainstream strategies for attacking poverty, such as education reforms and programs informing people about family planning issues, have repeatedly failed to solve the problem. He said he is simply looking for new ways to address it.

"It's easy to say, 'Oh, he's a racist, ' " LaBruzzo said. "The hard part is to sit down and think of some solutions."

It's not as if this country has ever done a good job providing low-income women with the tools and information to make their own decisions. Programs that aim to do that have been consistently underfunded and poorly implemented. So no, we haven't tried all other options. And even if we had, his idea is still completely appalling.

LaBruzzo is correct that it's very easy to say he's a racist. Because, um, he's espousing a historically racist policy. What he clearly deems to be a new and creative solution has unfortunately been around a long time. Compulsory or coercive sterilizations for low-income women, disabled women, and women of color were extremely common up until the 1970s, and slightly less common but nevertheless occurring with regularity the the decades since. The paternalistic attitude that "certain women" cannot be trusted to make their own reproductive decisions is still an underlying theme of a lot of backwards legal and policy decisions. LaBruzzo and Texas judge Charlie Baird are part of this despicable tradition.

Photo via ADAPT.

At Feministe, cripchick has a dispatch on the disability-rights group ADAPT's civil disobedience, going on now in DC:

600 ADAPTers are in DC fighting for affordable, accessible housing. At 4:30 am this morning they set up a tent city (named DUH City- HUD backwards) outside of the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). They spent the day talking to HUD officials, protesting at McCain's headquarters (11 arrests, I believe), and being escorted by the police to the Democratic National Headquarters to deliver information. Our feminist friends over at FRIDA are with them.

FRIDA (Feminist Response in Disability Activism) explains what ADAPT is agitating for:

ADAPT's housing platform points to America's longstanding and still growing crisis in the availability of affordable, accessible integrated housing. Many people with disabilities live on benefits that are only 18% of the median income, a full 25% below the poverty level, and an amount that is less than the national average rent for a studio/efficiency apartment.

"The federal government is sending stimulus payments to middle class workers, and is providing economic relief for the mortgage crisis, and maybe even the bank crisis," said Dawn Russell, Denver ADAPT. "What about all of us who live on fixed incomes? If we can't afford the cost of housing, we'll end up on the street or being forced into nursing homes and institutions. What are the federal government, Congress, and the presidential candidates going to do to help us with our housing crisis?"

Check out photos here, and follow ADAPT on Twitter here. Cripchick will be posting updates on her site, as will PhilospherCrip, pinky bear, and the Roving Activist, who are at the protest in DC.

A quick side note: If you have any questions as to why this is appearing on a blog with "feminist" in the title, please see Cara's post, "Disability Rights Are a Feminist Issue."