How the Pro-Choice Movement Excludes People With Disabilities

In a piece for RH Reality Check last month, Erin Matson highlighted anti-abortion groups’ false advocacy for people with disabilities. As Matson put it, it’s “well past time” for feminists to more robustly utilize a disability rights lens so anti-choicers can’t continue to monopolize the discourse.

It’s true that, for political reasons, we can’t afford for those on the other side to be the only ones talking about this issue. But I’ll go a step further: If we in the pro-choice movement don’t start paying serious attention to the ways in which our own practices contribute to the dehumanization of people with disabilities, we can’t claim to operate under a reproductive justice framework at all.

As Matson wrote, such a framework pushes people at the margins “to the center of analysis and activism.” For the most part, however, the reproductive rights movement has failed to publicly connect insidious abortion legislation with its effects on people with disabilities. In Texas, for instance, abortion advocates have heavily promoted discourse about how HB 2 has affected poor, rural women of color, especially in the Rio Grande Valley...