Why Do We Undervalue the Lives of Disabled People?

Ableism is why. Capitalism is why. A 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' mentality is why. We can and must do better, and it starts with a commitment to stop debating a person's worth.

Why do we undervalue the lives of disabled people so much? Why do we expect them to survive on a disability benefit that keeps them below poverty line, especially when being chronically ill drives expenses up?

In Canada, disabled people are expected to survive on approximately $1100 a month. With the rising cost of living, and the added expense of living with chronic illness, it’s nearly impossible.

This article will focus on disability benefits in Canada, but the messaging applies to just about anywhere in the world. Most countries do not provide disabled people with a living wage. They don’t make it easy to apply for benefits, and in fact actively discourage people by making the process as difficult and inhumane as possible.

This is a worldwide problem, and it’s because ableism is so pervasive. It’s because we’ve been conditioned to judge the worth of another person based on economic contribution, and it’s time we change things.

Canada is preparing to roll out a new ‘benefit’ called the CDB (Canada Disability Benefit). When this was promised, it was pitched as a means of lifting disabled people out of poverty. It was used to assuage concerns that expanding our Medical Assistance in Dying program to include people with disabilities would result in people accessing euthanasia due to poverty.

In short, we were promised a substantial benefit to help us stay alive in order to stop us from pushing back about a eugenics program clearly aimed at targeting us.

The CDB was announced at $200 a month, with multiple barriers to access. At least one province (Alberta) is already planning to claw it back from disability recipients.

If it were truly a benefit meant to help protect disabled people from accessing Assisted Death due to poverty, it would have needed to be considerably more. It also needed to be given automatically to anyone on disability, not be another program which requires significant hoops to access (many of which are difficult for the most marginalized among us).

I naively expected there to be more public outcry about this. I thought people would see the very obvious attempt at exterminating disabled people and speak out on our behalf.

No one did. When the election rolled around, none of the people running for Prime Minister addressed the concerns of disabled voters. No one had a plan to improve the CDB. In fact, we no longer even have a Minister for Diversity, Inclusion and People with Disabilities.

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Image Description: A photo of an empty black wheelchair sitting in front of a wall of greenery.

I generally seek to understand why the public reacts a certain way. With Covid I wanted to understand why people are so resistant to taking any precautions. Why they’re so willing to live in denial and risk their life and long term health rather than adapt their behaviour.

With bodily autonomy I seek to understand why those in power think they have the right to control women’s bodies. Why men don’t see an issue with the huge disparities in healthcare access and rights between us and them.

With health politics I seek to understand why people vote against their own interests. Why they elect those who will cause untold amounts of harm, and don’t push back when those who are objectively unqualified are tapped to lead important health positions.

With disability benefits, I wanted to understand why no one was fighting for us. Why no one could see that the CDB was an insult to disabled Canadians, and that chronically ill people the world over are dying every day due to legislated poverty.

Why couldn’t they see that our lives are undervalued? That many deem us ‘useless eaters’ just because we’re unable to work. That society has started allowing us to be called ‘economically inactive’, reducing us to broken cogs in the machine of capitalism instead of actual people.

So I spoke to a former ‘friend’ who was against providing any benefits to those who can’t work. This person knows my situation. He knows how sick I am and how hard I struggle to survive. Yet he’s maintained the attitude that government ‘handouts’ are wrong for a number of years.

I decided to ask him why. I tried to start a dialogue. I tried to understand how someone could be so opposed to providing the vulnerable in society with the means to survive.

When Ableism Goes Unchallenged, Eugenics Follows

I opened the conversation by discussing CERB, the Canadian emergency payment that people received if they were laid off due to Covid shutdowns. My friend was one of those people, and was paid $2000 a month while unable to work because of stay at home measures.

He’s a non disabled, young and cishet white man. Literally the most privileged group in society. He has means of providing for himself that someone like me can only dream of, plus doesn’t have the exorbitant expenses that come with being disabled.

Yet he was provided $2000 a month, when disabled people are only given $1100. I mentioned that this seemed unfair. If the government decided that the average Canadian needed $2000 to stay afloat through an emergency, why did he think disabled people could survive on half that?

He informed me that working people expect to live off what they make, and therefore if they’re suddenly unable to work they ‘deserve’ more money. They were counting on those funds and can’t be expected to make do with less.

He contrasted this with disabled people who he felt needed to learn to budget for their new circumstances and cut out any luxuries or frills (as if any of us have luxuries these days).

I tried to point out that no one plans a disability. The suddenness of it is no different from being laid off from work. I loved my job. It took years to establish myself in my field and get into my dream role. I planned to do it for as long as possible.

I didn’t wake up one day and say “I think in a year I will become totally disabled”. Life doesn’t work like that. Things happen, and they’re almost always unplanned. It’s not a moral failing or personal fault, it’s the nature of life. Most of us will end up disabled at some point.

The only way to plan to ‘make do with less’ would be to spend your entire life assuming you will be disabled and exist within that budget. I don’t know many people who would ever opt to do this (or who are even capable of understanding that they will likely end up disabled themselves).

Next I pointed out that when someone is laid off, that person at least has a chance to try and find an alternate source of income. It would have been hard during Covid shutdowns, but not impossible. Many industries were still operating so if someone couldn’t survive off the $2000 a month, they could try and apply for alternate work.

When you’re on disability, you are literally prohibited from earning any additional money. Depending on the plan you’re on, you may even be barred from inheritance and/or financial gifts. You may be forced to give up your assets (as is the case in the United States). You can’t marry without losing your benefits, because the expectation is that your spouse will take you on as a dependent.

It’s literally designed to be punitive. It’s designed to ensure you can never get ahead. If your disability is permanent, you won’t ever be able to work or earn again.

People were so angry during the Covid shutdowns. They were panicked about money and how long it would be before they could get back to work. While I completely understand the panic, I wish folks would extrapolate that to disabled people. Try to imagine how it would feel to know you would never be able to work again, and that whatever small benefit you’re receiving is going to be the most you will ever be able to live on.

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Photo Description: A photo of a Starbucks cup laying on the ground with change inside it.

That is a far more precarious financial situation to be in and yet for some reason, disability payments are almost half of what people on CERB received. My temporarily abled friend saw nothing wrong with that.

He also fundamentally misunderstood the nature of disability. He seemed to think all disability was permanent and in his mind, a personal failure. I explained to him that sometimes people are temporarily disabled due to surgery, an accident etc.

He felt those people deserved the same amount as a ‘working person’ but that the permanently disabled deserved less. He couldn’t even elaborate as to why he felt that way, but my assumption is it was because he could picture himself temporarily disabled and would want the assistance, but it was impossible for him to picture a universe in which permanent disability might befall him.

The last argument I made was an attempt to explain the ‘crip tax’. It’s a term given to describe the fact that when you’re living with disabilities, your costs rise exponentially. Being sick is expensive. There’s medical costs, caregiving costs, mobility aids, special diets, paramedical expenses… the list is endless.

Most of the things a disabled person has to pay for aren’t choices. We can’t cut them out. We can’t find a way to buy them cheaper. They’re fixed expenses that we literally will die without, and they add up in a hurry.

All he said to that was “survival of the fittest”. Which is often the argument non disabled people go to when they know they’ve lost the debate. We transitioned from ableism to eugenics in the span of a ten minute conversation.

He said that disabled people need to consider themselves ‘lucky’ to get anything and not be a burden on those who are still economically active. He said that even though I paid more taxes than him for a considerable portion of my life, all my ‘free surgeries’ and other healthcare expenses, combined with disability, clearly demonstrated that I was a net negative to the system. A drain. Nothing more than a red number on a balance sheet somewhere.

He was obviously angry at this point, which is what tends to happen when you challenge someone’s eugenicist mindset. I think deep down people know it’s wrong to treat others this way, but their ableism is so entrenched that there’s a cognitive disconnect. They lash out.

He went on to say that obviously I was the “exception”. That he wanted me to have everything I needed because he cared about me, but that in general he was sick of disabled people making it harder for him to get ahead. Stealing his tax dollars. Weighing down the system.

He couldn’t understand that his tax dollars line the pockets of the rich far more than they help someone like me, and that his inability to get ahead was more due to questionable personal choices as well as the punishing nature of end stage capitalism.

It is not and has never been the fault of disabled people.

Is This “Soft” Eugenics?

Not too long ago The Guardian published an article claiming the Trump Administration was practicing ‘Soft’ eugenics. I took issue with the descriptor, because I don’t think you should ever downplay what eugenics is. There is no such thing as soft eugenics. Killing people because of their disabilities or health status is anything but ‘soft’.

That being said, this conversation with my “friend” helped me to better understand what the article meant by ‘soft’ eugenics.

My friend wouldn’t advocate for killing people like me. He doesn’t want us rounded up into camps and exterminated. He wouldn’t take someone’s life just because they’re disabled.

But he also doesn’t think we deserve the necessary support to survive. When I pressed him on this, and asked what his ‘solution’ would be, he admitted he felt that healthcare and social supports should be taken away from disabled people so that ‘survival of the fittest’ can do its job.

He stopped short of saying we should be murdered, and instead opted to say that he felt it was wrong that our lives were being ‘artificially extended’ with social handouts. That we weren’t meant to survive, and if benefits were stripped away most of us would die a ‘natural’ death.

First, there’s nothing natural about that. It’s cruel and callous and absolutely falls in the category of eugenics. Second, it’s morally bankrupt.

I knew this was another friendship lost. I’ve lost so many people since becoming disabled that I have an entire article planned on the abandonment that those in our community have to endure.

It hurts every single time, but it’s impossible to keep someone in your life who thinks you should be left to die.

Knowing I would likely never speak to him again, I asked him what would happen if he ever became disabled. I asked if he would be ok forgoing healthcare and all social supports and just slowing dying so as not to be a ‘burden’.

I’m sure many of you can guess what his answer was, because it’s the answer most ableists give when forced to face the reality that disability can and likely will happen to them.

“I would just kill myself.”

Yep, he went straight to the ‘better off dead’ argument. This person had so much internalized ableism, so much disdain for people living with disabilities, that he had convinced himself he wouldn’t even want to survive.

I can assure you, the vast majority of us want to survive. We experience joy, we have people we love and who love us. We have hopes and dreams for our lives even if they look vastly different than they did before we became disabled. We are not ‘better off dead.’

And the reality is that most people will want to survive when faced with disability. They just can’t comprehend it because their internalized ableism is so strong.

When it happens to them, they often reach out to the disabled person in their lives with some manner of “I had no idea it was this bad!”. They ask for our help. They express fear that they won’t be able to make ends meet on the meagre supports provided. They express heartbreak at how most people in their lives are suddenly treating them as expendable. They express a desire to survive.

They almost never say sorry. They never acknowledge that they treated us badly and only want our help now because they have become an ‘other’.

That’s the nature of our world. As a society we undervalue the lives of disabled people so severely that almost no one fights for us until they’ve already joined our ranks.

We Need to Stop Debating a Person’s Worth

The root cause of this ‘othering’ is ableism, but I believe it goes deeper than that. End stage capitalism and society’s belief that certain people are inherently worth more than others has done untold amounts of damage.

We begin to associate our own worth with economic contributions. When we become disabled, we often struggle with being taken out of the workforce. We feel like burdens. We chide ourselves for being worthless and lacking purpose.

We are not worthless. Worth is a societal construct, and it’s not helping anyone.

Every single person has inherent value just by being themselves. It’s not about what they do for a living, how much money they have or how much they ‘contribute’ to society.

When we begin to debate a person’s worth, we’ve already lost. Fascism and eugenics both thrive on ‘othering’ people. On creating an enemy to blame for various problems that they don’t want to solve. Sometimes it’s immigrants, LGBTQ+ individuals, those living in poverty or those of us with disabilities.

It’s almost never privileged white people. Especially these days. Those who have the most in society are actively targeting the vulnerable, and they’re doing it by debating our ‘worth’ in public.

They convince the masses that rugged individualism is the way forward. That you can ‘try harder’ your way out of any difficult circumstance, and those of us who can’t are failing. We’re choosing not to. We have less value.

We have to agree not to debate each other’s worth. We must stand up for the most vulnerable in society whenever they’re targeted. We must stop believing that economic contribution is the only metric by which a human life is measured. It’s getting us nowhere fast.

We can fight back. We can raise our voice and resist wherever possible. Whether that be protests, boycotts, calls to elected officials or telling our own stories.

We can call out coded language whenever we hear it. When someone starts to assign value to a group of people, we can push back. We can remind them that we all have worth. We can point out that we were never designed to be the arbiters of another person’s fate.

We must all work together towards a common goal. A society that treats everyone with love, compassion and empathy. That provides universal healthcare, universal basic income, affordable food, housing and childcare. Clean air and water. A society that provides for the most vulnerable instead of catering to the elite.

A society that says no one deserves to be left behind.

I believe we can do it, but we have to start right away.

Have you been treated as ‘less than’ for being disabled? Or lost friends and family because of your disabilities?
What would you most like others to know about ‘soft’ eugenics and the way people with disabilities are treated?

Leave your comments below. Let’s all share our stories and encourage others to stop debating a person’s worth once and for all.