After his uncle was first elected president of the United States, Fred C. Trump III wanted to use the access he had to the White House for something positive, he explains in his new memoir, All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way. “I was eager to champion something my wife, Lisa, and I were deeply passionate about, something we lived every day: the challenges for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families.”
Fred Trump’s son was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder involving infantile spasms that led to developmental and intellectual disabilities. Having an intimate understanding of the way our society does not make it easy for families and caregivers to raise disabled children with dignity, Fred and Lisa Trump convened a series of meetings with White House officials, starting in April 2017, in hopes that the government might take action on this issue. For example, writes Fred Trump:
We discussed the need for all medical schools to include courses that focus on people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. We emphasized how crucial it was for hospitals and other acute-care facilities to help patients transition from pediatric to adult services. We emphasized the importance of collecting sufficient data to explain medically complex disorders.
After meetings with members of Donald Trump’s cabinet, including retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson (secretary of Housing and Urban Development), Chris Neeley (chair of the Committee for People with Disabilities) and Alex Azar (secretary of Health and Human Services), Fred Trump’s group was passed along to meet with the president in the Oval Office. At their meeting, which he wrote ran 45 minutes when he thought it would be just a quick handshake, Fred Trump explained that the president “seemed engaged, especially when several people in our group spoke about the heart-wrenching and expensive efforts they’d made to care for their profoundly disabled family members.” But after the meeting, Donald Trump called Fred Trump back into the Oval and reportedly said, “Maybe those kinds of people should just die,” given “the shape they’re in, all the expenses.”
According to Fred Trump, that was not the only conversation he had with his uncle about the issue. Fred Trump writes in All in the Family that when he needed help covering the cost of his son’s care and asked his uncle, who had been consistently contributing to a medical fund for Fred’s son, Donald Trump said, “I don’t know. He doesn’t recognize you. Maybe you should just let him die and move down to Florida.”
As a parent of a child with a disability, I found this excerpt from Fred Trump’s book deeply unsettling to read. It also reminded me why we need reproductive justice and disability justice. And now, with Donald Trump planning his return to the Oval Office, the stakes could not be higher.
Twelve Black women established the reproductive justice framework at a convening in 1994, responding to a health care policy proposal from former President Bill Clinton that did not adequately address the need for reproductive and sexual health care, particularly for people living in underresourced communities. The mothers of the reproductive justice movement were clear that while abortion care was essential for marginalized women to exercise their reproductive rights, Black women and other people of color would not truly experience reproductive freedom without also having “health care, education, jobs, day care, and the right to motherhood,” one of the founders, Toni Bond, explained in the 2017 anthology Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundation, Theory, Practice, Critique.
More than 10 years later, queer and disabled activists of color coined the term “disability justice” to create a framework that went beyond the disability rights movement’s single-issue focus on disability, which erased the ways in which race, gender, sexuality, immigration status, and other identities impact disabled people’s needs and lived realities. Much like the reproductive justice founders, disability justice practitioners are guided by principles centering those most impacted by racist, sexist and capitalist systems. “One cannot look at the history of US slavery, the stealing of Indigenous lands, and US imperialism without seeing the way that white supremacy uses ableism to create a lesser/‘other’ group of people that is deemed less worthy/abled/smart/capable,” explains a primer written by the founders of the disability justice movement. The primer adds:
A single-issue civil rights framework is not enough to explain the full extent of ableism and how it........