Disabilities and social construction in America part 1

Disability in the media, autism, and intersex are all issues I learned about in my philosophy class through University of Hawaii, Hilo. Disability in the media perpetuates the stereotypes of normality and the stigmas associated with disability. I was surprised to learn that the heroic death of a person with disabilities feeds the social prejudices associated with disabilities and that deafness takes a secondary role to other social stigmas.
Many people with autism have heightened senses and cannot function in the environment the way normal people expect them to. This doesn’t mean that they cannot communicate or feel or see. What surprised me most about autism was that there is a spectrum which includes overstimulation in hearing, touch, and seeing in various degrees. People with autism have extremely active minds and cannot process all of the sensations they receive at once. It’s not that there’s nothing going on inside; there’s actually too much.
Intersexuals have to deal with different social circumstances. The pressure applied to parents to pick a gender for their new-born child has left many people permanently scarred and in pain. I did not know there measurements for the size of genetials that define a person as male or female. I also didn’t realize there were so many ways for the genitals to be incomplete.
Overall, what I am most surprised with about disabilities are the choices parents make with regard to their children before the children can express their own autonomy and make choices for themselves. If the parents are abled, they want the corrective surgeries and implants. They will change their baby’s diet. These drastic changes that may or may not help their child “adapt” to the world around them is really a vain attempt in the hope of having their child be cosmetically normal instead of accepting their child for who the child is.
Social construction explains the effectiveness of the medical model. The reason for many of the surprising traits of a disability is the stigmatization of disability and impairment in our society. The stigmatization of individuals with disabilities stems from the medical community because the social construction of impairments and disabilities reifies the notion that life is not worth living if one has a disability. This socially constructed fear is the foundation for cosmetic normality and the basis for parents acting out of fear as well as in the hope of a finding a cure for their child.
According to the medical model of disability, disabilities are intrinsic to the individual that has them, and disability is the direct result of a physical condition. Therefore, the focus becomes not how well a person can perform certain tasks but the mode or way in which these tasks are performed. The medical model allows for the lack of accommodation of various disabled people and argues for the maintenance of a normal function. Norman Daniels states the three levels of health care are preventative health care, curative and rehabilitative, and services for individuals who cannot be rehabilitated. With cosmetic normality being more important than helping individuals function better in their daily lives, the social stereotypes, stigmas, and fears about disabilities are maintained (Amundson 2000).
By reifying abelism via claims about the quality of life and the biological origins of disability, accurate information about disabilities and impairments released to the public is suppressed. The stereotypes that cause parents to make terrible decisions on behalf of their children continue to be perpetuated. Most of the public remains terrified of variations in people that occur naturally- either during development in the womb or during the aging process- and unaware of the possible dangers their perspectives may have on the lives of others.