Hello, friends and allies. My name is Amythest Schaber, and I am Autistic. We live in a world
where, wrongly, some lives are considered to be worth less than others. Where disability
is so synonymous with tragedy that people say and mean things like, “If I became paralyzed
I would kill myself”, or “I don’t think life would be worth living if I couldn’t
see”, or “If you know your baby is going to be disabled, the only humane thing to do
is make sure they aren’t born in the first place”. We live in a world where wheelchair
users are approached and told that they are inspirations, simply for being outside of
their homes or attending to their jobs or grocery shopping like everyone else. Where
visibly disabled people are openly told, “I don’t know how you do it, I would not be
able to do it,” as if our lives are so bleak that the able norm cannot fathom why we have
not yet committed suicide. We live in a world where disabled people with cognitive, intellectual,
and developmental disabilities are spoken down to, patronized, and treated like children
— or worse, like animals incapable of thought or motivation, denied even the opportunity
to communicate. Where disabled people are institutionalized, segregated, stripped of
our autonomy and right to choose for ourselves. Where disabled children and adults alike are
mistreated, traumatized, and abused, all in the name of “treatment”.
Where disabled people are routinely denied equal opportunities for education and employment,
medical care and organ transplants, the right to adopt or to raise their own biological
children, the right to autonomy and self-direction, and equal protection under the law. This is
ableism. Ableism is a most insidious enemy. Its reach is all-encompassing. The very pillars
of our society— our medical establishments, our educational systems, our government in
all of its departments— have been built on a foundation of ableist ideals and practices.
Ableism is present in our sociological framework and in the day-to-day beliefs, values, and
actions of the average Canadian citizen. While an abstract idea to the able majority, to
the disabled community ableism is a very real oppression, something we know intimately and
something we struggle against every day. And it is this culture of ableism— this pervasive,
chronic devaluing of disabled lives— that has led us to this point. In the past five
years, over seventy people with disabilities have been murdered by their parents or caregivers
in North America alone. Each life lost is a true tragedy, but these are not isolated
incidents, separate and unconnected. The truth is that there is a deep, ingrained prejudice
in our society that asserts that a disabled life is not worth living, that to be disabled
is to be worse than dead. And so when one of our own is murdered, little attention is
given to the victim of these horrific crimes. Media coverage and public discourse surrounding
these killings overwhelmingly supports and even defends the actions of the murderer,
calling these killings “understandable”, “inevitable”, or even, “merciful”.
This is vastly different from the reaction when a non-disabled person is murdered by
their parent. Further demonstrating how these murders are sanctioned by society is the fact
that parents who murder their disabled children are much less likely to be charged at all,
and if they are charged, their sentences are consistently shorter or less severe than the
sentences received by parents who murder their non-disabled children. Some never see any
jail time at all. This, in turn, leads to more murders of disabled people. This is injustice
in its purest form. This is where the devaluing of disabled life has brought us. Because our
society’s understanding of what disability is, and what it means to be disabled, is informed
by the prejudiced opinions of the able majority, it is easy. It is easy to so objectify and
dehumanize disabled lives that we become exactly that—objects of pity, burdens on our families,
less than human. That is why it is so important for society to shift towards a person-centered
view and understanding of disability. It’s time to listen to disabled people. Because
if people would stop, and they would listen to us, they would hear what we are saying—
That our lives are worth living. Our lives are valuable. We want to live. They would
hear our voices saying, see our hands signing, feel our hearts aching for justice. And my
hope is that then, our society would stop seeing us as a collection of impairments,
as scary statistics, as a disease or epidemic, as shameful deviations from the norm, and
start seeing us as individuals, wholly human and deserving of the same rights and personhood
as everyone else. It is ignorance that leads to fear and hate, but it is education that
is the cure for ignorance. As an autistic person, that’s the only cure I want. It
is my greatest desire that, all together, the disabled community and our allies can
move the conversation away from negativity, hate, and fear, and towards acceptance, love,
and equality. It is my dream, and the dream of so many other disabled advocates and activists,
that one day we will live in a world where disabled lives are known to be worth just
as much as non-disabled lives. Where the murder of disabled people, and not our lives, is
rightly understood to be the injustice and tragedy that it is. Where disabled people
are leading the conversation about disability and educating the non-disabled majority. I
truly believe that, by staying strong and keeping faith— even in the face of such
adversity, such violence, such hate— and that by working together, the disabled community
and our allies alike, we can amplify our voices so the whole world hears what we have to say.
Together we can make a better, safer, fairer world for the next generation of disabled children. Thank you.
[quiet applause]
And now for Norm... Kunc? Norm Kunc.