ABSTRACT
While issues at the beginning of life and end of life are most controversial in the bioethics of disability, there is another relevant class of questions which concerns the acceptability or otherwise of attempts to prevent or cure impairment. The imagery of miracle cures is central to cultural representations of disability and medical research, and recent decades have seen an expansion of such coverage with the Human Genome Project, gene therapy and stem cell research. Disability activists and disability studies writers have challenged the obsession with cure, arguing that:
1 Disability is about social barriers and social oppression, not impairment. 2 The priority is structural change, not altering individuals to conform to social
norms. 3 Cure discourse individualises and pathologises impairment, which should be
understood in terms of difference, not deficit.
