Women with Disabilities: Abortion and Liberation

In this, the United Nations Decade of the Disabled, much is being done to improve the lives of those with disabilities, and to enable them to participate as equals in the everyday life of their communities.

At the same time, however, more and more technological 'advances' are being deployed to detect handicap in the unborn, with the aim of killing as many of them as possible before birth.

Feminists, though accustomed to fighting for the emancipation of women, are failing to address this incongruous situation, and the double discrimination faced by women with disabilities. This is partly due to the fact that they tend to regard abortion as an unequivocal 'right'.

I will argue that far from being a right, abortion underlines women's oppression and is counter-productive to women in general, and to disabled women in particular.     

The Structure of the Families of Schizophrenics

In the families of schizophrenic patients everything is subordinated to the neurotic or psychotic needs of one of the parents, and the whole family then works together to stop that parent from becoming psychotic. The other parent must become completely subjugated or withdrawn and leave the family under the domination of his spouse. This becomes a rigid system in which the patient's role is to “feel nothing, do nothing, and be nothing”, and any minor change in him becomes a major threat to the integrity of the whole family. It is when he can no longer maintain this role that the person becomes clinically schizophrenic. Some of the difficulties in treating schizophrenic patients in individual or family therapy are discussed.     

The parental families of Americans in birth cohorts 1890–1955: A categorical,linear equation model estimated from the NORC general social survey

A linear, categorical statistical model with five variables, Father's Education, Father's occupation, Size of Place at Age 16, Mother's Employment, and Total Siblings, is estimated with data from the 1972–1978 NORC General Surveys to describe the parental families of Americans in the birth cohorts 1890 to 1955. The major substantive conclusions are: (1) The educational level of American parents increased at an accelerating rate from 1890 to 1955, (2) The proportion growing up in farm homes declined steadily. Farm fathers were less well educated but the educational difference grew steadily smaller, (3) The proportion of Americans growing up in cities of 50 000 or larger increased steadily, the trend being similar in both educational levels, (4) Metropolitan families increased at an accelerating rate, the acceleration being due to the acceleration in education attainment, (5) Farm families decreased at an approximately constant rate because two opposite trends — acceleration in Education and declining association between Education and Farm cancelled each other out, (6) Town Families —non farm families living in cities under 50 000 increased throughout the period, but faster before 1930 than afterwards, (7) Metropolitan families had consistently more children and more employment of mothers than Town families; farm families were slower in experiencing the trend toward working wives; farm families were about the same as town families in decreasing rates of fertility, so the urban/farm gap in fertility remained constant, (8) at the turn of the century higher status mothers were more likely to have small families and less likely to work. After 1910 the pattern changed, as better educated families opted for the pattern of working mothers and fewer children. By the birth cohort of 1955 the education difference in fertility had grown considerably while the education difference in maternal employment had reversed.