The MIT Science Club for Disabled Children

http://goo.gl/uT6kcM

On a winter morning in 1994, Massachusetts resident Fred Boyce turned on his car radio, and was shocked by what he heard: a Federal committee had just revealed that 50 years earlier, a group of children at Fernald State School -- an institution for the developmentally disabled -- had been unwittingly fed radioactive cereal by MIT researchers.

“That can’t be right!” he yelled. “That’s me!”

In the late 1940s, Boyce was one of some 90 children, most of whom were classified as “feeble-minded,” who were selected by MIT to be used as test subjects. With offers of free meals and Boston Red Sox tickets, they’d been coaxed to join a “Science Club” without knowing that their inclusion would make them guinea pigs for various radiation-laden nutrition studies funded by Quaker Oats.

It wasn’t until decades later, on that winter morning in 1994, that Boyce became aware of what he’d been secretly put through. What ensued was one of history’s most searing debates about the ethics of academic research, and the necessity of informed consent.


“New Scientist” Reporter Goes Over Oregon Assisted Suicide Data With NDY’s Diane Coleman

http://goo.gl/32vqUS

Diane Coleman, head of advocacy group Not Dead Yet, which opposes assisted suicide, says the Oregon Health Authority’s annual reports on the practice show the law there isn’t working as intended. She points to the motives people gave for choosing this option. According to the latest figures, released on 12 February, only a third of people who took a prescribed lethal dose of medication in 2014 cited pain or fear of pain as one of the reasons for doing so.

Supporters of assisted suicide often cite pain as a primary reason why people should have the legal right to die. But the state’s report showed that people’s concerns tended toward loss of autonomy (91 per cent), loss of dignity (71 per cent) or being a burden on their family (40 per cent). Coleman is particularly concerned that people are choosing assisted suicide because they feel they are a burden. “To me that feels more like a duty to die than a choice to die,” she says.

What’s more, according to the data available for Oregon, some people waited longer than six months between asking for the overdose and taking it. It isn’t stated how many times this happened, but at least some people lived a few years after obtaining the drugs. Coleman is concerned that this means people are being accepted for assisted suicide who don’t meet the criteria of havingless than six months to live. “Those people were not actually terminally ill,” she says.


Michigan Eugenics

Thanks and a hat tip to Michelle M.....

http://goo.gl/HgBGTq

Number of Victims

There were at least 3,786 officially documented cases of sterilizations  in Michigan.  Of the 3786 cases, 74% of sterilizations were carried out on females and 26% on males. 440 sterilizations cases were carried out on people considered mentally ill, while 2927 were carried out on persons deemed mentally deficient. The remaining 419 were of neither--those considered “sexual deviants, epileptics or moral degenerates” (Paul, p. 375).  According to a study by the Human Betterment Foundation stated that 76% of the total sterilizations were performed on the feeble-minded, and 73% of all sterilizations were on women. Of the insane, 82% were women, and 72% of the feebleminded were female. In “the HBF category of others,” most of the women suffered from epilepsy, while “many of the men were presumably sex offenders” (Hodges, “Dealing with Degeneracy,” p. 187).

Period When Sterilizations Occurred

Sterilizations in Michigan occurred from 1914 through 1963 (Paul, p. 382). The vast majority of them occurred after the Michigan passed its last sterilization law in 1929.

Under-the-radar sterilizations without consent continue to this day.

How a lack of imagination in technology keeps the world inaccessible to huge numbers of people.

Thanks and a Hat Tip to Marty R...

http://goo.gl/3JJUho

Consider the U.S. Black Hawk helicopter. Its engineers used conventional standards to construct their design. Those standards required that the design of workstations and equipment in the cockpit fit the bodies of 90 percent of users. In this case, the user population of the Black Hawk comprises Army pilots only, whose body sizes must fit into the existing aircrafts they fly. And here’s the problem: Fitting 90 percent of Army pilots doesn’t necessarily guarantee fitting 90 percent of Army personnel (or 90 percent of the U.S. population). A recent study of the body shapes and sizes of female pilots found that 90 percent could successfully reach all critical controls in the Black Hawk. However, in the general Army population, more than one-third of female soldiers and almost three-quarters of Hispanic female soldiers physically did not have the right size or shape body to fly a Black Hawk. The study did not examine men, but other research on variation among soldiers’ bodies would suggest that some subgroups of men might well also fall significantly outside the necessary range of body shapes and sizes. They could not have flown the Black Hawk if they wanted to. They were disabled by design.

Every technological design—every workstation, piece of safety equipment, computer, building, vehicle, etc.—must first imagine the bodies of its potential users. Yet current engineering design imagination and practice routinely exclude a variety of different kinds of bodies, including but not limited to people with disabilities. Only in a few explicit cases—and for a few specific kinds of bodily disabilities, such as those that require wheelchairs—are the bodies of people with disabilities reliably incorporated into the design imagination.

Becoming a Person The biography of Robert Martin

http://goo.gl/kSkZNw

Brain-damaged at birth, Robert Martin was locked away as a child in places for the ‘mentally deficient’ where he suffered neglect, abuse and violence. He came to understand that he and his friends were ‘nothing people; worthless and valueless, without opinions or rights’. Robert became a runaway, a thief, a scrapper and an activist. But he also stole books and educated himself, and began a civil rights campaign in small town New Zealand that helped grow an international movement.


Home and Community-Based Services: Creating Systems for Success at Home, at Work and in the Community

http://goo.gl/MQBw7S

In this report, NCD reviews the research on outcomes since Olmstead, and finds that strong trends indicate that smaller, more dispersed and individualized community settings further integration and positive outcomes for individuals with disabilities. Specifically, greater individual choice, satisfaction, housing stability, and higher levels of adaptive behavior and community participation are associated with living in residential settings of smaller size. This research tends to support the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (HHS/CMS) decision to promulgate final regulations impacting all Medicaid Home and Community Based Services authorities which establish that only settings of limited size and with certain characteristics will be entitled to receive Federal Financial Participation under the various Medicaid HCBS authorities.


State must release full records of abuse at care facilities, court says

http://goo.gl/Y96HPa

In a victory for freedom of information advocates, the California Supreme Court decided unanimously Thursday that the state must release all information — except for patients' names — about documented abuses in long-term care facilities for the mentally ill and developmentally disabled.

The decision, written by Justice Goodwin Liu, will prevent the state from heavily redacting information when responding to public records' requests about citations issued by the Department of Public Health against government-owned facilities. Efforts to learn about the nature of abuses have been hindered in the past because the agency said it was bound by a patient-confidentiality law to omit most information.

Duffy Carolan, who represented California's Center for Investigative Reporting in the case, called the ruling "a complete victory under the Public Records Act."

"Now residents at the facilities, and their families and the public are going to be able to hold the facilities and the Department of Public Health accountable," Carolan said.


A college experience for students with intellectual disabilities

http://goo.gl/RM62Qd

At the University of Cincinnati, the Transition and Access Program (TAP), a four-year program for students with mild to moderate intellectual disabilities, offers a non-degree option for students who want to actively engage in the college experience. TAP includes participating in regular college courses, independent living on campus, and the opportunity for professional internships. The goal of TAP, which is paid for by parents, scholarships, or community agency support, is for its graduates to receive the training and experience necessary to embark on successful careers.

"This is a program that can increase the independence of these students, because typically after they graduate from high school, they don't have a chance to live independently," said Heidi Brett Mendez, TAP program director. "They don't have a chance to experience college. They don't have opportunities to explore different careers."

TAP requires the students to complete a paid internship on campus each spring through the duration of the four-year program, in keeping with UC's vision to create an authentic, inclusive living and learning experience that builds career skills, academic achievement, personal responsibility and interpersonal competence, resulting in a promising future for young adults with intellectual, cognitive and learning disabilities.


The Quest For Social Justice Goes Mobile

http://goo.gl/osIhM7

From protests demanding democracy and justice to the rise in citizen journalism and documentation of police encounters, the year 2014 has been a year of mobilized action—mobile being the operative word. In light of civil unrest in politically charged places including Ferguson, Missouri, New York City, Hong Kong, and Mexico, a new genre of platforms and apps designed to bring underreported acts of injustice to the forefront are making their way into the hands of demonstrators across the globe.