Transcript of, "Disabled Not Disposable - Joe", produced by Rooted in Rights JOE: Hi, my name is Joseph Stramando. I am an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at San Diego State University and in addition to that, I have done some work in activism with groups like ADAPT, Little People of America, various Independent Living Centers, and actually Disability Rights Texas, so I've also been involved in the P&A system previously. The value of disabled lives is that they are of value to the disabled people that live them. (laughs) I think that, you know, the value of any life is judged primarily by the person who is living that life and, you know, the thing that gives folks a right to life is that they themselves have plans and goals and hopes and dreams and people they love and so on that would be taken away from them if they die and so disabled people have all those things just as anyone else does. This is a hard one. I'm not sure that there is any silver bullet to this. I'm not sure that there is sort of the perfect triage protocol out there that is going to be completely free of ableist bias but I do think that there are better and worse criteria to use for triage protocols. For instance, there are some protocols that make very broad judgments about specific disabilities. I know that I read a wonderful piece in the New York Times recently from Ari Ne'eman about this exact issue and he highlighted Alabama and Tennessee and their statewide triage protocols that said that people with intellectual disabilities would just sort of be de-prioritized right out of the gate. As well as people with, I believe it was Spinal Muscular Atrophy who might need help with activities of daily living be de-prioritized right out of the gate. Now the reason why that's so problematic is that this is clearly an implicit judgment about quality of life. Actually in the case of something like intellectual disability, that's not a co-occurring morbidity. That's not going to impact whether or not someone is going to be successful with treatment and survive the disease. So there's no real medical reason to de-prioritize someone with an intellectual disability. It's only because there's this judgment about their value. Bioethicists talk about, and activists too talk about "value of life" and so on and so forth and sometimes that's a pretty vague term but I think it's very appropriate in this case. In addition to that, sometimes "quality of life" kinds of considerations are sort of dressed up as something else. For instance, in the complaint that Disability Rights Washington and others with HHS and the Office of Civil Rights, they specifically looked at the policy that was developed at the University of Washington, which talked about not only doing triage according to who is most likely to survive but in addition to that, doing triage according to who was most likely to survive and be healthy and that addition is just slipping in sort of an ableist view of quality of life and dressing it up as something more objective Right? Because they're not saying that the goal is to maximize the number of lives saved. They're saying that the goal is to maximize the number of non-disabled lives saved by talking about prioritizing "the healthy". This is about not only pushing back against the explicit, obvious ableism that says, "Your life has less value so we're not gonna treat you." It's also about pushing back against the implicit ableism that says the profit margins of the corporations are more important than your life. [NARRATOR]: Produced by Rooted in Rights. End of transcript.