ABSTRACT
Such concerns engage questions about medical ethics and the complexities of reproductive choice; concrete dilemmas about how to organize the practical logistics of care for disabled children; political and distributive queries about what citizens are owed; and conceptual questions about how disability is figured discursively. While such issues are often made the subject of public policy debate, they come already anchored in the daily and intimate practices of embracing or rejecting kinship with disabled fetuses, newborns, and young children. We suggest, then, that disability criticism should encompass not only the public arenas of law, medicine, and education, or the phenomenology of embodiment. It also needs to engage the intimate arena of kinship as a site where contemporary social dramas around changing understandings and practices of reproduction and disability are often first played out. Although the term kinship is conventionally associated with the private or domestic sphere, we stress the cultural work performed by the circulation of kinship narratives through various public media as an essential element in the
refiguring of the body politic as envisioned by advocates of both disability and reproductive rights.
