{"id":216884,"date":"2020-01-15T16:30:11","date_gmt":"2020-01-15T22:30:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=216884"},"modified":"2020-01-15T14:49:16","modified_gmt":"2020-01-15T20:49:16","slug":"paralympic-champion-pressured-abort-disability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/paralympic-champion-pressured-abort-disability\/","title":{"rendered":"Paralympic champion was pressured to abort because of her disability"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson has had quite an accomplished life. She’s an avid athlete, a politician, a television presenter, and has served as chancellor of Northumbria University since 2015. She’s also married, and has one daughter — and she’s accomplished all of this as a wheelchair user. Yet despite all that Grey-Thompson has been able to do, she still faced discrimination due to her disability, especially when it came to having children.<\/p>\n

Grey-Thompson appeared on a BBC podcast, “Stumps, Wheels and Wobblies,” and revealed how she was pressured to have an abortion<\/a>, and told she shouldn’t have children due to her disability. Grey-Thompson was born with spina bifida.<\/p>\n

“My daughter is 17 now, which is slightly scary, but when I was pregnant I lost count of the number of people who asked me how I got pregnant,” she said in the podcast<\/a>. \u201cThe first thing I was offered at my first scan was a termination because, ‘People like you should not have children,’ I was told. [The doctor and I] had a discussion about \u2018was I trying for a baby?\u2019… and the individual had some quite complicated views on disability.”<\/p>\n

According to Grey-Thompson, the doctor was concerned that her disability might “spread” if people like her “breed.”<\/p>\n

READ:\u00a0AWFUL: Head of ACLU disability rights project supports aborting the disabled<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n