Open letter to Mo Mowlam

from Nabil Shaban

I am a disabled and "deformed" person. I was born a "deformed" baby.
I found, when you were talking on the 29 March edition of Newsnight,
your apparent unquestioning of a parent's right to choose to abort
a "deformed baby" utterly repugnant, totally repellent and a complete
obscenity. If my mother had had half a chance, she would have aborted me,
would have murdered me, to avoid having a deformed child. You and the
disgusting amendment in the 1991 Fertilisation and Embryology Bill would
have given her the right, and I would be dead today. And I would not have
thanked her, you, or this so-called "democratic" parliament of ours which
you seemed so keen to boast about.

Presumably you think you have a right to live, but you obviously don't
think that I have if someone who is not me decides my deformities and
disabilities are such that my life would be worthless. Hitler, with his
euthanasia program, was able-with the collaboration of the medical profession
-to write us off as "life unworthy of life". You say you are a socialist,
I say you are a national socialist. You think you have a right to live,
and yet you aid and abet the process of ridding the world of "deformed"
people. You like Byron's poems? He was disabled. Toulouse Lautrec's paintings?
He was disabled. Admired JFK? He was disabled. And Stephen Hawking,
the new Einstein? What have you given the world with your non-deformity?
Why should we disabled let you live?
Nabil Shaban

The New Statesman and Society - 9th April 1993