[nfbmi-talk] adrienne ass nyt

joe harcz Comcast joeharcz at comcast.net
Tue Nov 26 21:46:39 UTC 2013


Adrienne Asch, Bioethicist and Pioneer in Disability Studies, Dies at 67By
MARGALIT FOX
Adrienne Asch, an internationally known bioethicist who opposed the use of
prenatal testing and abortion to select children free of disabilities, a
stance informed partly by her own experience of blindness, died on Nov. 19
at her home in Manhattan. She was 67.

The cause was cancer, said Randi Stein, a longtime friend.

At her death, Professor Asch was the director of the Center for Ethics and
the Edward and Robin Milstein professor of bioethics at Yeshiva University
in Manhattan. She also held professorships in epidemiology and population
health and in family and social medicine at Yeshiva's Albert Einstein
College of Medicine.

"She certainly was one of the pioneers in disability studies," Eva Feder
Kittay, a distinguished professor of philosophy at Stony Brook University
and a scholarly colleague of Professor Asch's, said in an interview. "She
was a very strong voice, always bringing in the disability perspective,
trying to change the view of disability as some tragedy that happens to
someone, rather than just another feature and fact about human existence."

Professor Asch, who was trained as a philosopher, social worker, social
psychologist and clinical psychotherapist, produced scholarship that stood
at the nexus of bioethics, disability studies, reproductive rights and
feminist theory.

She maintained that the lives of disabled women should be as much a feminist
concern as those of able-bodied ones. Disabled women, she argued, had long
been doubly marginalized: first because of their sex, and again because they
failed to conform to a collective physical ideal - an ideal to which at
least some able-bodied feminists subscribed.

Professor Asch's scholarship centered in particular on issues of
reproduction and the family. In an age of fast-moving reproductive
technologies, she found that those concerns dovetailed increasingly with
issues of disability rights.

She became widely known for opposing prenatal testing as a means of
detecting disabilities, and abortion as a means of selecting babies without
them.

Professor Asch supported a woman's right to abortion. (She was a past board
member of the organization now known as Naral Pro-Choice America.) But in
her lectures, writings and television and radio appearances, she argued
against its use to pre-empt the birth of disabled children. She argued
likewise for prenatal testing.

For her, supporting abortion in general while opposing it in particular
circumstances posed little ideological conflict. The crux of the matter, she
argued, lay in the difference between a woman who seeks an abortion because
she does not want to be pregnant and one who seeks an abortion because she
does not want a disabled child.

In the first case, Professor Kittay explained, "you're not seeking to abort
'this particular child.' " In the second, she said, "when you're seeking to
abort because of disability, it's not 'any potential child,' it's this
child, with these particular characteristics."

Adrienne Valerie Asch was born in New York City on Sept. 17, 1946. A
premature baby, she lost her vision to retinopathy in her first weeks.

When she was a girl, her family moved to New Jersey, then one of the few
states that let blind children attend school with their sighted peers. She
attended public schools in Ramsey, in Bergen County.

On graduating from Swarthmore College with a bachelor's degree in philosophy
in 1969, she found employers unwilling to hire her - an experience, her
associates said, that made her keenly aware of disability as a civil rights
issue.

After receiving a master's degree in social work from Columbia in 1973, she
spent much of the '70s and '80s working for the New York State Division of
Human Rights, where she investigated employment discrimination cases,
including those involving disability.

Trained as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in the 1980s, she maintained a
private psychotherapy practice throughout that decade. In 1992, she received
a Ph.D. in social psychology from Columbia.

Before joining the Yeshiva faculty, Professor Asch taught at the Boston
University School of Social Work and at Wellesley College, where she was a
professor of women's studies and the Henry R. Luce professor in biology,
ethics and the politics of human reproduction.

Her publications include two volumes of which she was a co-editor: "Women
With Disabilities: Essays in Psychology, Culture, and Politics" (1988, with
Michelle Fine) and "Prenatal Testing and Disability Rights" (2000, with Erik
Parens).

A resident of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Professor Asch is survived
by a brother, Carl, and a sister, Susan Campbell.

In an article in The American Journal of Public Health in 1999, Professor
Asch laid out her philosophy in no uncertain terms.

"If public health espouses goals of social justice and equality for people
with disabilities - as it has worked to improve the status of women, gays
and lesbians, and members of racial and ethnic minorities - it should
reconsider whether it wishes to continue the technology of prenatal
diagnosis," she wrote.

She added: "My moral opposition to prenatal testing and selective abortion
flows from the conviction that life with disability is worthwhile and the
belief that a just society must appreciate and nurture the lives of all
people, whatever the endowments they receive in the natural lottery."

Regards,


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