Opinion: The real toxins faced by people with disabilities

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.

Disabled people in the United States are already significantly more likely than non-disabled people to live in poverty, especially if they are Black, Indigenous, LGBTQ+ or women. Despite supposed protection from discrimination, many disabled people struggle to find and maintain employment, and may be paid sub-minimum wages.

Supplemental Security Income and Social Security Disability are notoriously difficult to access, and even those who can access these benefits are forced to live in poverty and subjected to strict asset limits that prevent them from escaping. The administration is now preparing to cut SSI even further.

In a country where health insurance is tied to employment, it’s unsurprising that disabled people — often underemployed — have reduced access to affordable, quality care. As the current administration endeavors to cut Medicare and Medicaid, gut public health systems and spread vaccine misinformation, they are not only threatening the health of disabled people, but creating an environment where more people will become disabled by lack of access to health care and the continued spread of infectious diseases.

The current administration is also defunding research that aims to better support autistic people, improve medical care and increase educational equity. Instead, it is backing poorly designed research that reaches faulty conclusions while ignoring decades of evidence. These funding priorities send a clear message — our leaders don’t value disabled lives or well-being.

More than one in four adults and one in five children in the U.S. have disabilities. If we can’t care for or support the current disabled population, how can we care for and support future generations and the increasing number of people becoming disabled by harmful social and policy environments?

Disabled people have always existed — there’s evidence of people caring for disabled individuals throughout human history. But today, our country’s leaders prioritize misinformation over our lives while disabling even more people by ignoring decades of evidence and lived experience and stripping away our already insufficient safety nets.

These actions show a failure to address the needs of a large portion of our population as well as a failure to prepare for our country’s future. Disabled people and our communities deserve better.

Sam Streuli is a policy volunteer with the Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network.