Following on her "Women Deserve Better" op-ed published earlier this month in the Observer, Sorin Fellow Laura Wolk (L '16) was recently interviewed by Crux columnist Kathryn Jean Lopez. In the interview, Laura reflected on her own experience as a blind woman and the relationship between individualism, disability, and true freedom:
My blindness has helped me to realize the myth of the individualistic ideology that drives the need for abortion. Individualism basically centers on the idea that everyone has the right both to make choices, and to access whatever might be necessary to make those choices a practical reality.
Emphasizing this so-called decisional and physical autonomy – two quintessentially able-bodied traits – as the bulwark of freedom raises many problems for the disabled.
Laura continued on to explain that aborting children who are diagnosed with disabilities in the womb deprives society of their potential contributions, as well as deprives them of the very dignity they inherently possess as human beings: "We will lose, and are losing, something very rich from the tapestry of the human experience by deciding on a societal level that whole classes of people do not warrant the right to life because we deem them valueless or, worse, a net negative."