The Significance of Constantly Checking Equality and Prioritizing It Over Social Inequalities

 Another one from the Disability Studies course.

In Nazi Germany, they tried to eradicate the "handicapped" through eugenics, to create a "pure" race of healthy, beautiful, intelligent and useful people. The Nazi methods of achieving master race domination were, like the system as a whole, radical, from forced sterilisation to concentration camps and killing. Nevertheless, there are parallels between today's, covert, eugenics and the mentality in Nazi Germany. Not long ago, people with disabilities were still being forcibly sterilised in Slovenia, and even today, many people discourage the reproduction of 'disabled' people. Too often I see comments about 'disabled' people not having children, because the children will then suffer. This may be justified in the case of diseases that are inherited: I myself, for example, would prefer not to have children because of my predisposition to certain disorders, which are also influenced by genetics, as I have experienced first-hand how difficult it is to grow up with them. On the other hand, most of the comments about parents with disabilities are completely unfounded, as many diseases are proven not to be inherited. When confronted with these facts, people who are still ardent eugenics advocates quickly resort to the argument that parents with disabilities need much more help and support and are generally worse parents than "normal" people. And that's where we come in, the incredibly altruistic and good people, who contribute five Euros so that a mother with cerebral palsy can more easily afford a nanny to help look after her child. The system does not take care of this, which leads to the conclusion that eugenics is still very much present in our country, because even if the reproduction of "people with disabilities" is not directly prohibited or prevented by the state (the right to freely decide on the birth of children is constitutional), it creates conditions in which the reproduction of people with disabilities is hindered.

Although most of us believe that our society and system is very egalitarian, it is noticeable that, despite equality on paper, the system is extremely unfair. It is banal that we can draw parallels without thinking too hard between the social order of today, tenth of January two thousand and twenty-four, and that of Nazi Germany. If, directly or indirectly, on paper or in practice, we prevent a certain group of people from exercising a constitutional right, that is discrimination. The indirect deprivation of the right to reproduce is the first step on the road to a system in which only a certain group of people who are sufficiently beautiful, intelligent and useful to society have rights, while the others are just an amorphous mass without rights.