Miracle Boy Grows Up Quotes

“In 1996, when Senator Bob Dole runs against President Clinton, it’s a historic moment for people with disabilities. No one with a visible disability has run for the high office since Franklin Roosevelt—and unlike Roosevelt, Dole is forthcoming about his impairment (an arm injured in wartime). It sets a political conundrum for some in the movement: Dole may be one of us, and may have been an early supporter of the ADA, but aren’t Democrats better for disenfranchised minorities? That same year, a woman with Down syndrome becomes the first person with that diagnosis to receive a heart and lung transplant. She’d been turned down at first, but hospital administrators cave to activists. These and other”
― Ben Mattlin, Miracle Boy Grows Up: How the Disability Rights Revolution Saved My Sanity

“Barbara brings her chair close to mine. She says that, to the outside world, suicide could seem a rational choice for someone like her or me. After all, our shared diagnosis is terminal in many cases. “Anybody else contemplating suicide would receive intervention, because they’re assumed to be depressed and treatable. But you and me . . . ? Society is too quick to allow cripples to off themselves,” she says. In fact, society sometimes seems to encourage disabled people to get out of the way, stop being a burden or stop using up scarce resources, she goes on. It can push disabled people to the margins, where they naturally become depressed. And instead of identifying their depression as treatable—instead of creating opportunities that make their lives worth living—society (she calls it “the majority culture”) wants to push for the right to die before it’s established the right to live. “You know about Jack Kevorkian, right?” she asks.”
― Ben Mattlin, Miracle Boy Grows Up: How the Disability Rights Revolution Saved My Sanity

“widespread. Some states go so far as to forcibly sterilize people with certain disabilities. Some prohibit marriage for the genetically disabled, for fear of procreating hereditary conditions like mine. Visibly disabled people are actually barred from appearing in public in cities such as Columbus, Ohio—Dad’s hometown—until 1972, and Chicago until 1974, under what are collectively called the “ugly” laws because they target anyone perceived as unattractive, for being a disturbance of the peace. The movement to change all this and more is rising in discrete pockets all over, inspired by Black civil rights. Closer to”
― Ben Mattlin, Miracle Boy Grows Up: How the Disability Rights Revolution Saved My Sanity