Over the decades of my long life, I have collected a strong and secure group of friends, mostly women. We are educators and writers, and we have bodies also understood as having significant congenital disabilities. When we appeared in the world, our parents were unsettled, even shocked. We simply showed up without a story. They had to take us in, and they did, even though certain aspects were unexpected and unwanted. They did not choose us: they held us in their arms because they had to. Some of us were indeed given away or locked away, but most of our parents held on to us despite their bewilderment. We were gifts that stretched our families’ humanity, but no one much recognized that at the start. We made lives for ourselves from our circumstances and our temperaments, as do all our fellow humans, living as freely as we could within the constraints of our place and time, our embeddedness in the world.

Today parents face the terrible freedom of having to choose whether or not to have a child with a disability.