eugenics in eradicating disabled lives is not equal to the abortion of foetuses
discovered to have developed a disability, a current life cannot be compared to a non-
existent life. However, arguably, in arguing that disabled foetuses should be aborted,
are we not, in turn, implying that disabled lives are not worth bringing into the world?
Despite this arguably being the following natural conclusion, Brecher (2011) does
not argue that a disabled life is worth less; he does not consider being born deaf to be a
tragedy- he instead argues that bringing a disabled child into a society where their
ability to flourish would be lessened, is a life worth avoiding. Brecher (2011)
acknowledges how disabled people could interpret such a claim as saying their lives
are not worth living. However, he argues that a life can be worth living while still
working to eradicate the, as he perceives, undesirable conditions of such life. Brecher
(2011) uses slavery as an, as he admits, rather different analogy- he claims that just
because a slave may consider their life worth living despite slavery does not mean we
should not work to abolish slavery and that, like for slavery, just because some
disabled people consider their life worth living does not mean we can apply that to all
disabled.
This argument, however, is flawed. Despite acknowledging the difference between
being a slave and having a functional disability, Brecher’s (2011) use of slavery as an
analogy falls short after examining it outside the argument of ‘life worth living’. While
a person can be born as a slave, a social status forced onto a person is far different to
an inherent biological difference- a person born a slave can be freed from slavery, but
most, if not all, functional disabilities cannot be cured; for example, learning
disabilities (Akin, 2021). Furthermore, the lobbying for the eradication of slavery is
the fight for the reformation of a social structure, but the argument for eradicating
disability is the fight to remove a group of people from society, as implied by
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