There’s been something in the news quite a lot recently – lots of different stories about the same subject, and all to do with justice.
Can you guess what I’m talking about?
One story is a report that says women with a learning disability will generally die 27 years earlier than women without a learning disability. For men the figure is 23 years earlier. This is bad enough, but the figure has risen since the last report.
There was an article about disability hate crime online being three times higher. Then there was the court case about provision of additional needs support in schools – or rather the lack of provision due to changes in funding.
There was also a piece about children with autism locked up in facilities miles away from their families.
Then I spotted the speech Sally Phillips gave to the Royal College of Gynecologists about Down Syndrome ‘screening’.
And today I saw an article about a blind man trying to find mental health support, who was rejected eight times by different therapists because of his blindness.
Apparently this is normal and a British Medical Journal survey states that long wait times for healthcare is the biggest obstacle faced by one in four people living with a severe disability.
You’ve probably guessed by now that I’m talking about disability in the news.
There were more items in the same vein, but the report on the early deaths of those with learning disabilities stood out because I know people who have been treated differently in the medical sphere just because they are disabled.
I have one young friend whose life was deemed to have no quality and therefore treatment options offered were sparse, until his mum fought for his life – literally. This child’s quality of life was better than many children with no disability, so why was that judgement made?
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Source: Christian Today
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