During the past year, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made a series of false statements referring to “environmental toxins” as a cause of autism. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is creating a truly toxic environment for people with disabilities.
Trump has spent his first year in office removing access to health care, exacerbating poverty, reducing access to food, threatening civil rights and contributing to stigma against already marginalized people. The stress Americans now face will in fact cause even more disability.
The relationship between collective conditions and individual health outcomes has been the subject of extensive research — the social model of disability, developed in the 1970s and 1980s by disability activists, posits it’s not the differences in our bodies that makes us disabled, but rather, the ways our society fails to support us. A society that devalues disabled people and refuses to provide the things we need (e.g. mobility devices, accessible buildings, affordable health care) is disabling by nature.
A lack of inclusive social and physical environments disable us much more than our bodies do.
Research shows inequality, trauma, poverty and discrimination are disabling and can result in conditions including high blood pressure, chronic pain and mental health disabilities. By taking away rights and making life harder for us people with disabilities, our government is creating an environment that will cause more disability.