âI have sat in philosophy seminars where it was asserted that I should be left to die on a desert island if the choice was between saving me and saving an arbitrary non-disabled person. I have been told it would be wrong for me to have my biological children because of my disability. I have been told that, while it isnât bad for me to exist, it wouldâve been better if my mother couldâve had a non-disabled child instead. Iâve even been told that it wouldâve been better, had she known, for my mother to have an abortion and try again in hopes of conceiving a non-disabled child. I have been told that it is obvious that my life is less valuable when compared to the lives of arbitrary non-disabled people. And these things werenât said as the conclusions of careful, extended argument. They were casual assertions. They were the kind of thing you skip over without pause because itâs the uncontroversial part of your talk. Now, of course, no one has said these things to me specifically. They havenât said âHey, Elizabeth Barnes, this is what we think about you!â But theyâve said them about disabled people in general, and Iâm a disabled person. Even just thinking about statements like these, as I write this, I feel so much â sadness, rage, and more than a little shame. Itâs an odd thing, a hard thing, to try to take these emotions and turn them into interesting philosophy and careful arguments. My first reaction isnât to sit down and come up with carefully crafted counterexamples for why the views I find so disgusting are false. My first reaction is to want to punch the people that say these things in the face. (Or maybe shut myself in my room and cry. Or maybe both. It depends on the day.) Itâs a strange thing â an almost unnatural thing â to construct careful, analytically rigorous arguments for the value of your own life, or for the bare intelligibility of the claims made by an entire civil rights movement.â