New Mobility's "Person of the Year": Harriet McBryde Johnson

Posted on January 19, 2004 by Ampersand

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed I’m a fan of disability rights activist Harriet McBryde Johnson – I’ve blogged about her New York Times articles here and here.

(If you haven’t read Johnson’s articles, then you’re in for a treat! The first, Unspeakable Conversations, is about her Princeton debate with Peter Singer, who in disability rights circles is considered pure evil. The second, The Disability Gulag, is a critique of the American disabled care system. Both articles are funny, well-written, politically engaged, and human.)

Anyhow, New Mobility magazine has awarded Johnson their “person of the year” award. There’s a short, interesting article about Johnson, including this passage:

One public figure, Charles Colson, the Watergate crook turned born-again Christian, was critical of both Singer and Johnson on his Web site: “Ms. Johnson, obviously an able advocate, wrote that she doubted whether she had bested Singer in the exchange. The reason is that, as an atheist … she has no moral basis to refute Singer’s deadly logic so long as she embraces his premises about the origins of life. Only the Christian ideal, that all life is sacred because it is created in the image of God, provides an unassailable answer to Singer’s reasoning. It’s the only sure basis for protecting people like Harriet McBryde Johnson from a moral calculus that reduces them to non-persons.”

“Colson’s answer,” replies Johnson, “is not an answer at all, let alone an unassailable answer, unless you happen to believe in the Judeo-Christian god. I don’t. I uphold the value of life as an important foundation to building a just society, the kind of society that’s fit to live in. The idea is so useful that I don’t worry about whether it is ‘true’ in some ultimate or transcendent sense.”

The article includes the good news that she’s working on a book, to be published by Henry Holt..

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2 Responses to New Mobility's "Person of the Year": Harriet McBryde Johnson

  1. Aaron says:
    January 19, 2004 at 2:39 pm

    Ms. Johnson has a piece in the new National Lawyers Guild newsletter which comments on the difficulties she had at the recent convention in Minneapolis.

    Johnson’s appearance at Princeton shows up Singer – even though Johnson is physically debilitated, her mind functions well, as shown by the article and the NLG Guild Notes article.

    Singer ignores that there *can* be bright-line rules drawn between abortion and infanticide (society acknowledges people’s birth, but not their conception), or between human and animal (it’s pretty clear than humans cannot cross-breed with apes, unlike buffalo and cattle or horses and donkeys).

    The Oregon assisted-suicide law would screen out people like Ms. Johnson, as well as other people with progressive neurological disorders like MS or ALS – it’s impossible to predict the progress of these diseases as opposed to, say, cancer.

    The Oregon assisted-suicide law merely allows people who are too incapacitated to commit suicide normally to have someone assist them – and a number of people die during the waiting period.

  2. patricia olds says:
    November 15, 2004 at 5:37 am

    I have ms and live in a wheelchair. Harriet M. Johnson is my heroine. I am working on accessibility and sensitivity in the village of Yellow Springs, OH. I would like to get in touch with Ms Johnson to invite her to come here to speak. Can you give me her phone number?

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