[Image Description: A group of disabled queer Black folks talk and laugh at a sleepover, relaxing across two large beds. Everyone is dressed in colorful t-shirts and wearing a variety of sleep scarves, bonnets, and durags. On the left, two friends sit on one bed and paint each other’s nails. On the right, four people lounge on a bed: one person braids another’s hair while the third friend wearing a C-PAP mask laughs, and the fourth person looks up from their book. In the center, a bedside lamp illuminates the room in warm light while pill bottles adorn an end table. Jonathan Soren Davidson for Disabled And Here.]

Media influences our thoughts, actions, culture, and society. How we view ourselves and others is shaped by what we collectively watch on the screen. So what happens when the rare representation of a group of people portrays their existence as so miserable that death is preferable? Society condones their death through policies and laws that are rarely questioned. This is the unfortunate side effect of unfit media representation of disabled folk. While according to the organization Respectability there are more disabled people on our screen than ever, the plot lines of “disability movies” often reuse the same ableist narratives (Applebaum, 2019).

Take the movie Me Before You for example. In the film, the main character Will is a formerly successful banker who lives a great life until he becomes paralyzed in an accident, turning him depressed and suicidal. The film follows a cheerful able-bodied woman who tries to cheer him up “despite his disability” as he spends the film trying to go through with assisted suicide. When he finally does pass away, the narrative is put in place that he is “finally freed from his disability” and it’s for the best because life while disabled just isn’t worth it. If it wasn’t shockingly clear, this is an extremely ableist plot that unfortunately isn’t unique. This problem goes far beyond American Media. In the Spanish film “The Sea Inside Me” also follows a newly disabled person who spends the entirety of the movie trying to kill himself and when he does, there is a celebratory tone, because, at the very least, he’s no longer disabled.  A movie plotline might not seem important, but its effects are powerful. In fact, Dirth and Branscombe’s (2017) study concluded that how abled people view disabled characters in media, had a strong influence on the support or opposition to pro-disability policy, including issues of access to basic health and social services.

According to Silverman (2020), in Alabama, a young woman walked into the ER with severe COVID19 symptoms. Doctors determined that she needed to be placed on a ventilator, but she wasn’t. The protocol used to arrive at this decision lists several health conditions for which doctors “should not offer mechanical ventilator support for”. Except, before COVID19 this woman was healthy. But not for Alabama hospital protocols, for them the fact that she had Down syndrome meant that her life was worth less than an able-bodied person. These policies aren’t unique to Alabama, according to the Center For Public Integrity (Whyte, 2020), 25 states, this pandemic, have ventilator rationing policies that could put disabled folk at risk of being denied, simply for being disabled. Some state policies could even allow a ventilator to be taken away from a disabled person who uses it as an everyday breathing aid, to be given to an able-bodied person. All under the false premise that disabled people have inherently “low quality of life”; with the implication that makes our lives are not worth living or saving. This is a form of modern-day eugenics called “ICU-genics”.

The Center for Public Integrity recounts the story of Matthew Foster, a young man with an intellectual disability. Mathew Foster works at Chuck E Cheese, spends his day reading, and FaceTiming his girlfriend, and family. Mathew’s mother’s reaction to policies denying his son the proper and life-saving medical care keeps her up at night: “I was outraged and still am that any decision-maker or policy-maker in our state would think so little of people with intellectual disabilities that they would actually say an IQ score determines whether you live or die.” Matthew’s mother has reasons to be terrified. Our society embraces ableist beliefs about disabled people pushed by bias and misleading media representation. Let me be clear, disabled lives are not inherently tragic. Studies by the US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health (Van Leeuwen, 2011 ) showed that disabled people are happy, which may not fit the cookie cutter able-bodied definition of “happiness” but is just as worthy. While the characters from our movie screen might become depressed after sustaining spinal cord injuries, this is not a permanent and universal condition. Van Leeuwen also reported that “increases in life satisfaction were found in persons with SCI in the long run.” So, shocker: disabled people don’t actually want to die.

The second false common ableist belief pushed by our screen is that disabled folk don’t contribute to society, and therefore aren’t worthy of saving. A human being’s ability to contribute monetarily shouldn’t have any basis on their worth or ability to be saved. Furthermore, disabled folk do contribute to society in multitudes of ways. According to the CDC (2018), one in four people are disabled, so many of the world’s major change-makers are disabled; our president is disabled, Harriet Tubman was disabled. While movies like Me Before You might make it seem like the disabled characters provide nothing to the world once they become disabled, disabled people are changing the world every day and deserve to be alive to do so. This is why misrepresentation is so dangerous.

As long as our culture is held under the influence of media representation that portrays disabled lives as ones that aren’t worth living, then we will continue to let disabled people die. So what should we do? Challenge the narratives in these films, educate people on why they are false. Amplify and create representation that shows disabled people’s real multifaceted lives. Possibly, most importantly, we need policy change that protects the lives of disabled folk, that weighs us as equals so we never see the mass death of disabled people we saw during this pandemic. Disabled lives are worth living and saving, it’s time that our media representation and policies show that.