Irritations

I have noticed that in posting I use some words - like presumably - too much and that some words come in waves - like irritation. At the moment we are in an irritation wave and I have yet another to report, this one from a recent Guardian. This may be more a reflection of the fact that we buy the Guardian more than any other newspaper rather than the Guardian being particularly prone to triggering the 'I' word.

That being as it may, the article in question was a celebration of the marriage of two people with learning disabilities, or mentally handicapped to use the euphemism of my youth, not to mention the more readily understood, if coarse and wounding, labels of the vernacular. The irritation arose from the tone of the article being very much that such people had every right to enjoy the state of marriage, along with the rest of us, and that interfering busy bodies, aka bizzies, should back off.

The piece, by-lined Frances Ryan, told us nothing about her, but google comes up, pretty much instantly, with the news from the Guardian web site that Frances Ryan is a freelance writer, writing predominantly on disability, feminism and LGBT rights and that she is currently completing a doctorate on equality of opportunity. She blogs at http://differentprinciples.co.uk/.

My irritation stems from the fact that such marriages can give rise to children, a problem which gets no space in her piece. I have no idea how common this is or would be without the interference of the bizzies, but I do have the idea that having children in these circumstances might well be a very bad idea. Leaving aside the prior possibility that the disabilities in question might be hereditary, how is such a pregnancy going to go and how is the raising of such children going to go? What happens when the presently loving parents (of the disabled couple that is) get old and tired? Who, in their absence, is going to provide the help with child rearing that the disabled couple are quite probably going to need? Certainly going to need if they already need help themselves. Who is going to pay for it? Is it a good use of scarce support money? Supposing such children not to have any particular learning difficulties themselves, how are they going to feel about their parents when they are old enough to know? Most of us get embarrassed about our parents as adolescents, but most of us grow out of it. How is this going to play here? How do the human rights of a yet-to-be-conceived child weigh against those of the couple in question?

I recognise that all of this is tricky and that providing the right sort of support on the ground is tricky. Getting the right sort of people to provide that support is tricky, never mind finding the money to pay them. But I do like my pieces in newspapers to be a bit more even handed. Perhaps the pendulum does need to swing towards support and away from prohibition, but it is not helpful for the pendulum to go off the other side of the scale.

Perhaps also the olden days when people with learning disabilities lived in leafy suburban asylums and all the females took a contraceptive pill every morning along with their porridge did have something going for them.