A Conversation With Anne Finger About Disability, Abortion, And Assisted Suicide
We’re being told that medicine is supposed to get rid of disabled people — either by curing us or killing us. This idea is deeply rooted in industrial culture. I think there will be tremendous social pressure to “choose” suicide in the future.
The problem with “special” babies is that they become adults who are no longer considered special, whose presence no longer inspires any message about the sanctity and holiness of life.
I had to go to India to get my gold. By “my gold” I mean only a few pieces of jewelry — about as much as I might wear to a big party. I had bought it for a song in Arabia twenty-five years ago. Was it worth the price of a trip to India? I had no idea. I had no intention of selling it, but wanted only to move it from the Varanasi bank where I’d kept it since I lived in India, to one in the U.S., so that my granddaughter could one day wear it to my funeral.
In the summer of 1973 I was eighteen years old and working as a swing-shift orderly at a San Diego old folks’ home called Lemon Acres Convalescent Hospital. They paid me $1.65 an hour, five cents more than minimum wage; but gas was a quarter a gallon, cigarettes were thirty-five cents a pack, and you could get a hut on the beach in Leucadia or Encinitas for eighty-five dollars a month.
I haven’t lived well because I didn’t know until recently who the enemy was. I thought the enemy was outside, somewhere far removed from me — the communists, the Serbs, the Muslims. I didn’t know that the true enemy was much closer at hand.
When I was eighteen I became addicted to cocaine and would use my body to get the drug. At my dealer’s house, I’d find a man who had just copped and hadn’t shot it all yet, and I would sidle up to him, numb and jittery, talking and asking questions, probably not making any sense. Eventually, he would offer me a hit. In a bizarre version of gallantry, as if opening my car door, he would measure a portion into a spoon, mix in water, drop in a tiny cotton ball, and siphon up the liquid.
The days blur into one another. The years. I eat too fast. I try to slow down, but something keeps pushing me forward. To the next bite. The next sentence.
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