Human reproduction is increasingly dependent on medical technology, financial transactions, genetics and decisions among many choices which have to be taken prior of the child’s conception. Comparative analysis of these processes shows the increased number of medical reproductive interventions as well as an increased number of adults who are either biologically or socially involved in the birth of a child and a growing number of personal choices which are made and some new ethical dilemmas. Reproductive technologies and choices strongly influence people with disabilities.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1536250052
The cross-national comparison of the rights of people with disabilities to work and to gain actual citizenship rights is the focus of the article. Under state socialism people with disabilities were not defined as poor, but as the ‘children of the state’, since they were protected by a wide net of large social institutions. Poverty of persons with disabilities in the region increased after the disintegration of state socialist economies and is especially sharp in countries where social transfers are low or hardly exist and where the social dimensions of health are not taken seriously. People with disabilities are disproportionately represented among those living in extreme or chronic deprivation since poverty causes disability and conversely disability can cause poverty. Simultaneously, they are still constructed as unable to work without really being given the opportunity to be involved in paid employment. Therefore, disability activists see the right to work as the primary means of achieving greater justice. As much as one is advocating the right to work one can criticise the ideology of mainstreaming work in the era where some types of work are disappearing, some are replaced by high technology and some work creates new army of the working poor. The ambivalence between the end of the neoliberal- era- understanding of work and mainstreaming work of people with disabilities is one of the today’s ethical dilemmas.
COBISS.SI-ID: 4137573
The paper focuses on the experiences and experiencing of handicap, policies of self-understanding as well as the life plans and aspirations of students with disabilities. In the article, we draw on the results of a qualitative survey of students with disabilities who are studying at various faculties of the University of Ljubljana. The research results show that students with disabilities are able to reshape their identities in a way which does not consist of the experienced disability but is independent of it and are capable of accepting their disability as a reality of their own life, without losing a sense of their own purpose of life and life plans. This experience is a significant part of the identity formation of people with disabilities and the precisely produced social experience of people with disabilities strengthens their selfhood and creates new responses and challenges to the contemporary dilemmas of identity formation and identity policies.
COBISS.SI-ID: 32388189