Adrienne Asch, an internationally recognized bioethicist who opposed the use of prenatal testing and abortion to select youngsters free of charge of disabilities, a stance informed partly by her own experience of blindness, died on Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 67.
The result in was cancer, mentioned Randi Stein, a longtime pal.
At her death, Professor Asch was the director of the Center for Ethics and the Edward and Robin Milstein professor of bioethics at Yeshiva University in Manhattan. She also held professorships in epidemiology and population wellness and in loved ones and social medicine at Yeshiva’s Albert Einstein University of Medication.
“She undoubtedly was a single of the pioneers in disability scientific studies,” Eva Feder Kittay, a distinguished professor of philosophy at Stony Brook University and a scholarly colleague of Professor Asch’s, stated in an interview. “She was a really robust voice, always bringing in the disability standpoint, trying to change the view of disability as some tragedy that transpires to an individual, rather than just one more attribute and fact about human existence.”
Professor Asch, who was educated as a philosopher, social worker, social psychologist and clinical psychotherapist, produced scholarship that stood at the nexus of bioethics, disability research, reproductive rights and feminist concept.
She maintained that the lives of disabled girls must be as significantly a feminist concern as people of in a position-bodied ones. Disabled women, she argued, had lengthy been doubly marginalized: 1st since of their sex, and yet again due to the fact they failed to conform to a collective physical perfect — an ideal to which at least some capable-bodied feminists subscribed.
Professor Asch’s scholarship centered in particular on troubles of reproduction and the family members. In an age of quickly-moving reproductive technologies, she located that those concerns dovetailed increasingly with issues of disability rights.
She became broadly recognized for opposing prenatal testing as a indicates of detecting disabilities, and abortion as a signifies of choosing babies without them.
Professor Asch supported a woman’s right to abortion. (She was a previous board member of the organization now recognized as Naral Professional-Selection America.) But in her lectures, writings and television and radio appearances, she argued towards its use to pre-empt the birth of disabled kids. She argued likewise for prenatal testing.
For her, supporting abortion in basic whilst opposing it in certain circumstances posed minor ideological conflict. The crux of the matter, she argued, lay in the difference among a girl who seeks an abortion since she does not want to be pregnant and a single who seeks an abortion because she does not want a disabled youngster.
In the 1st case, Professor Kittay explained, “you’re not looking for to abort ‘this certain little one.’ ” In the second, she explained, “when you are searching for to abort because of disability, it is not ‘any potential child,’ it is this little one, with these specific characteristics.”
Adrienne Valerie Asch was born in New York City on Sept. 17, 1946. A premature baby, she lost her vision to retinopathy in her 1st weeks.
When she was a woman, her loved ones moved to New Jersey, then a single of the handful of states that allow blind youngsters attend school with their sighted peers. She attended public colleges in Ramsey, in Bergen County.
On graduating from Swarthmore College with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1969, she discovered employers unwilling to hire her — an experience, her associates said, that created her keenly mindful of disability as a civil rights problem.
Right after receiving a master’s degree in social work from Columbia in 1973, she invested a lot of the ’70s and ’80s doing work for the New York State Division of Human Rights, in which she investigated employment discrimination cases, such as those involving disability.
Trained as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in the 1980s, she maintained a personal psychotherapy practice throughout that decade. In 1992, she acquired a Ph.D. in social psychology from Columbia.
Ahead of joining the Yeshiva faculty, Professor Asch taught at the Boston University School of Social Work and at Wellesley University, the place she was a professor of women’s studies and the Henry R. Luce Professor in biology, ethics and the politics of human reproduction.
Her publications consist of two volumes of which she was a co-editor: “Women With Disabilities: Essays in Psychology, Culture, and Politics” (1988, with Michelle Fine) and “Prenatal Testing and Disability Rights” (2000, with Erik Parens).
A resident of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Professor Asch is survived by a brother, Carl, and a sister, Susan Campbell.
In an post in The American Journal of Public Health in 1999, Professor Asch laid out her philosophy in no uncertain terms.
“If public wellness espouses ambitions of social justice and equality for individuals with disabilities — as it has worked to improve the standing of women, gays and lesbians, and members of racial and ethnic minorities — it ought to reconsider whether it wishes to carry on the technology of prenatal diagnosis,” she wrote.
She added: “My moral opposition to prenatal testing and selective abortion flows from the conviction that daily life with disability is worthwhile and the belief that a just society must value and nurture the lives of all individuals, no matter what the endowments they obtain in the natural lottery.”
Adrienne Asch, Bioethicist and Pioneer in Disability Studies, Dies at 67
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