 |
 |
1. Apropos of dear Mary Warnock, listmembers may be interested to read her lecture which is reprinted in the Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of London, vol 33 no 5 (sept/oct 1999) entitled 'The politicisation of medical ethics', where she repeats her prejudiced remarks about people with Downs syndrome and has a go at feminists, post-modernists and people in the disability movement. 2. Although I am at variance with almost everything she says, I think that she scores some hits with her attack on the social model, which I am increasingly coming to think is inadequate as the basis of intellectual or empirical work, however effective it is as a mobilising force or political strategy. There are various reasons for my claim, which Nick Watson and I have outlined in a forthcoming paper (and everyone is familiar with most of them). Just to highlight one problem with the SM: where does impairment stop and disability start? This query could be raised with almost any condition, but let's give the example of someone with a speech impediment (and I mean no offence to anyone). How far is the difficulty of communication which this raises to do with the individual's impairment status, and how far is it to do with society's unwillingness or unpreparedness for such an individual, the customary methods of communication etc? I would argue that the social experience results from a complex interaction of both, and that it is impossible to say where impairment ends and disability starts, and that in fact the question is pointless. The social model, because it forces us to dichotomise, is leading us down the road to crude thinking, and opening us up to the sort of attacks made in Warnock's lecture. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%