United Nations Wants to Define What it Means to be Disabled

   by Gary DeMar

My father was disabled. He wasn’t born with only one leg. His right leg was blown off mid-thigh in a mortar attack while serving in the Korean War.

When you and I think of the disabled, most people have in mind the blind, deaf, physically handicapped, and the wheelchair bound. But don’t ever think that disabled means the same to liberals or anyone at the United Nations. And with the very broad definition of what it means to be disabled, there will be requests for more money and regulations.

I recall that when Ronald Reagan was governor of California that he signed an anti-abortion bill into law that had an exception feature – the health of the mother. Most rational people would think that “health of the mother” meant that the pregnant woman’s life was in danger if the pregnancy was carried to term. This rarely happens, so that’s why many pro-life advocates make provision for it in legislation.

The “health of the mother” provision was used as a catch-all exception clause that ended up allowing any type of “health” issue to be used to justify abortion. If a woman’s mental health was affected in any way, she could use that as a reason to get an abortion. That exception led to a radical increase in the number of abortions in California, the very thing Gov. Reagan tried to stop.

When Ronald Reagan signed the Therapeutic Abortion Act on June 14, 1967,

“as would happen with nearly every abortion law in the years ahead, the mental-health provision was abused by patient and doctor alike. Reagan biographer Lou Cannon notes that even the bill’s Democratic sponsor confessed to being surprised that physicians so liberally interpreted the law.


“Reagan was shocked at the unintended consequences of his action. [Edmund] Morris said Reagan was left with an ‘undefinable sense of guilt’ after watching abortions skyrocket. Cannon claims this was ‘the only time as governor or president that Reagan acknowledged a mistake on major legislation.’ Clark called the incident ‘perhaps Reagan’s greatest disappointment in public life.’”

A similar thing happened when RICO, short for the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, was passed into law. It was designed to go after organized crime, but it was used by liberals to go after pro-life groups that opposed abortion, See, for example, National Organization for Women v. Scheidler (1994).

G. Robert Blakey, the original drafter of the bill, made it clear that RICO was not intended for groups like the Pro-Life Action League. Even so, it didn’t stop liberals from using it in an anti-freedom way. The National Organization for Women pursued Joe Scheidler for 20 years until the Supreme Court, in an 8–0 decision, ruled in favor of Scheidler and the Pro-Life Action League.

With just these few examples in our own country, can you imagine what would happen if we gave authority and jurisdiction to the despots at the United Nations to define what a disability is?

If we ever let the United Nations define what it means to be disabled, we’ll be finished as a nation. With the definition come sanctions. Maybe a disabled person will have to be committed in order to be “re-educated.” A UN-defined disabled person could be anyone who disagrees with the UN’s definition of what it means to be disabled. Being disabled could be defined in political and religious terms. The UN might require that the United States treat these disabled people in order to get their minds right. The Nazis and Soviets had their Statist definitions of what it meant to be disabled.