This post is a compiled snippet from a Twitter thread that I've transported over here for posterity. The original thread started here: https://twitter.com/b_cavello/status/1578597568740610048

I’m a big believer in people’s agency over their own lives and healthcare decisions, but we also must acknowledge that health is very much socially dependent in addition to medical/biological. Pretty much all of us rely on others for our wellbeing. That’s not bad, but it’s true.

Our mutual dependency can make the definitions of consent difficult to starkly define, however. This is particularly dangerous for those whose suffering is normalized such as for disabled people, the mistreatment and neglect of whom many choose not to acknowledge.

Content warning: abuse, suicide
www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/canada-is-heading-toward-a-human-rights-disaster-for-disabled-people/2021/02/19/01cbfca4-7232-11eb-85fa-e0ccb3660358_story.html

I can’t recall the name of the phenomenon… (maybe it had to do with airlines?) it describes the perverse incentive that leads a company to worsen the standard experience in order to pressure people toward paying more just to gain back what used to be the baseline.

An even darker form of these perverse incentives exist when it comes to care for people who many in society unconsciously believe should not exist. They deny the mutual care that we all require and allow such suffering that death is seen as a “compassionate” alternative.

From the article: “Such thinking treats disabled people’s suffering as primarily medical, but as the experiences of patients like Foley show, sometimes that suffering can be caused by the denial of care.”
www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/canada-is-heading-toward-a-human-rights-disaster-for-disabled-people/2021/02/19/01cbfca4-7232-11eb-85fa-e0ccb3660358_story.html

Speaking for myself, I am incredibly dependent upon other people. I rely on so many people I know and people I have never and will never meet. People who produce food I eat, who manage waste water treatment where I live, who make my incredibly fortunate abundant life possible.

Without their help and without my family’s, community’s, and government’s investment in these forms of mutual care, I would likely be in a very sorry state. I am not capable of fully “independent living,” nor do I desire to be. I am grateful to be in society, in a care network.

So when we deny people care, deny them food and waste treatment, and kindness, we are not revealing their “true state.” We are withholding the natural state that all of us exist in. We are denying them the baseline that we all expect and coercing them toward other options.

This is part of why so many of us take issue with the idea of disabled people having “special needs.” Actually, everyone has needs, and many of them are pretty basic. Denying those needs because someone is disabled isn’t an attribute of a disabled person, it is a social choice.

One of the big differences between being disabled or not is whether or not your society acknowledges and addresses your needs and whether your environment is accessible to you to meet those needs.

I don’t know if other folks thinking about disability resonate with this example, but here’s one way I think of things:
Shoes are a really common accessibility device. It’s super normal to wear shoes, so much so that most people don’t even think about it.

But if you try to walk around our cities without shoes, you’ll find that things are much less accessible. Many areas are sharp or may have painful or dangerous temperatures like hot asphalt or snowy (or salty) sidewalks. It can be tough to traverse our world without shoes!

You can interpret this through the lens of personal deficiency. You can claim that using a mobility aid is a “weakness” or (ironically) “a crutch.” You might scoff at the idea of creating smoother surfaces to walk upon as “unnatural.”

But most of us (especially those ambulatory folks who like not making contact with every surface we move across) don’t think of shoes or pavement (or carpet or tile or wood flooring) as unnatural aids to our insufficient forms. We largely don’t think of them at all.

It is a privilege to exist in a society and a space where great care is put into something like my ease of movement. I’ve come to appreciate this even more from @HillhouseGrady’s fantastic videos about the thought and effort that enable our infrastructure
youtube.com/c/PracticalEngineeringChannel

It is a privilege that my shoes—mobility aids that I depend upon anytime I go for a walk—are so cheap and widely available and customizable (not just by fit but also by style!) for me to access.

My “natural” state of being is not atomized. It is deeply dependent and interconnected. All of us exist in a world shaped by the work of others. When we acknowledge that, we can begin to appreciate the responsibility we carry to ensure that all of us are recognized and cared for.

It is our responsibility to create a world where everyone has their needs met, not one where only those whose needs are met can exist.