The introductory chapter outlines the book’s central premise: disabled people have as much right to live in the world as the non-disabled. It introduces the human rights and critical disability studies methods used to interrogate the problem of disability discrimination throughout the life cycle, especially at the beginning and end of life. Along with providing an overview, the introductory chapter argues that the book is particularly needed because disability equal rights struggles remain marginal in mainstream bioethics and law.

Chapter 6 examines the regulation of access to controlled and prohibited substances for symptomatic relief and palliative care. It argues that restrictive drug control policies, especially uniform drug prohibition, are incompatible with disability rights because they are discriminatory against disabled people in pain. The chapter concludes that permitting a wider range of controlled substances to be accessed by people with impairments, especially those eligible for assisted dying, strengthens their right to live in the world by giving them greater options to live with their conditions.

The refusal and withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment and care by, and on behalf of, people with impairments are the focus of Chapter 4. The chapter argues that greater attention must be given to the socio-economic contexts in which these non-treatment decisions are made. It also argues that the selective non-treatment of disabled infants and the non-consensual withholding and withdrawal of life-sustaining care from people with disorders of consciousness are incompatible with disability rights. The chapter concludes that disabled people, and their health care proxies, should not simply have rights to refuse or withdraw life-sustaining interventions, they must also have rights to request life support.

Chapter 2 focuses on the regulation of selective abortion following prenatal screening and testing. It argues that disability-selective abortion bans may appear to be compatible with disability rights but that such bans are ultimately misguided because they fail to recognise the socio-economic context in which reproductive decisions are made by prospective parents. The chapter concludes that disability-inclusive abortion laws would not legally entrench differential time limits for pregnancy termination based on foetal impairment: if disabled foetuses can be aborted until birth, then the same should apply to non-disabled foetuses.

The regulation of embryo testing, selection, and gene editing, as part of assisted reproduction, is the focus of Chapter 3. The chapter argues that restricting or prohibiting the transfer of embryos with impairments during assisted reproduction is incompatible with disability rights. It also argues that if embryos can have their impairments removed through gene editing, then preventing the creation of disabled embryos would be incompatible with regulating assisted reproduction in a disability-inclusive manner.

Chapter 5 focuses on the regulation of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia, or medically assisted dying. The chapter considers whether restricting access to assisted dying to people with impairments amounts to disability discrimination. It contends that any ‘right to die’ should apply no more to people with impairments, including those with life-threatening conditions, than to others. The chapter concludes that impairment-based eligibility for assisted dying legally entrenches ableism and that only disability-neutral assisted dying laws would be compatible with disability rights.

Pre-approval access rights to potentially life-preserving experimental treatment is the focus of Chapter 7. The chapter considers whether people with life-threatening conditions should have a right to access possibly life-saving experimental treatments, as embodied in right to try laws. It argues that, despite their significant shortcomings, right to try laws bolster disability rights by seeking to advance the right to life and survival of people with life-threatening conditions beyond medically assisted dying.

The concluding chapter summarises the book’s central argument that laws, policies, and practices which privilege the birth and survival of the non-disabled fundamentally challenge the notion that people with impairments have an equal right to live in the world. It also discusses avenues for further research, before closing with some final remarks.

To use Ronald Dworkin’s well-known phrase, moral equality is usually taken to be the ‘egalitarian plateau’ on which theories of social justice (including theories of social equality) are built. If this is right, then people living with dementia must be our moral equals, in the sense of possessing the same basic moral standing, if we are to have duties of social justice towards them. Yet there are a number of influential moral philosophers who hold that severe cognitive disability, including advanced dementia, can strip a person of this status. This chapter defends the moral equality of people living with dementia, at all stages of progression, and thereby also defends the weight of their claims to social justice.

This chapter focuses on the work of Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. It offers an account of the major strands of their thinking, how their work evolved over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s, and the ways some important formulations in queer and trans studies can be traced directly or indirectly back to these writers. Sedgwick engages with the entangled relations between sexuality, knowledge, and feeling and Butler with the coconstitutive connections among gender, sexuality, and notions of embodiment. Butler’s and Sedgwick’s critiques of what were commonsensical ideas about gender and sexuality still raise powerful questions about bodies, identity, and collective movements, even as later scholarship puts pressure on the implicit frameworks that shape how those questions are posed and addressed in their work.

The Equality Act provides protection against discrimination on the ground of various protected characteristics: sex, race, disability, age, religion and gender. It protects against direct discrimination where there is adverse treatment because of a protected characteristic, and also indirect discrimination where the same rule is applied to all groups but has an unjustified and disproportionate adverse effect on a group. Adverse treatment includes harassment and victimisation. There is in addition a duty of reasonable accommodation for disabled workers. The law also requires equal pay for women for similar work or work that has equal value to that performed by men.

This chapter addresses the principle of non-discrimination within international administrative law. It examines how international administrative tribunals distinguish between types of discrimination—direct, indirect, positive, and negative—and outlines the allocation of the burden of proof in these cases. The chapter reviews grounds of discrimination, such as race, gender, nationality and place of residence, age, and disability. The jurisprudence spans a variety of contexts, including recruitment, salaries and financial entitlements, career progression, pension rights, and contract termination. The chapter also analyses the principle of equal pay for equal work, a cornerstone of the prohibition of discrimination, discussing its scope and limits. While many rulings reflect a high standard of scrutiny, some structural forms of discrimination persist within employer organisations, particularly concerning gender. The chapter concludes that, despite advancements, international administrative tribunals continue to play a crucial role in addressing and reducing discrimination through judicial oversight.

This introduction sets out a few overarching themes: Hemingway as a restlessly experimental writer, one driven to represent an ever-greater range of human experience and expression. Hemingway’s pressing against the boundaries of readers’ taste and tolerance is introduced, as is his identity as a person who lived with both visible and invisible disabilities and treated the ways of being in the world specifically available to the disabled.