Adrienne Asch, Bioethicist and Pioneer in Disability Studies, Dies at 67

Adrienne Asch, an internationally known bioethicist who opposed the use of prenatal testing and abortion to select children free of disabilities, a stance informed partly by her own experience of blindness, died on Nov. 19 at her home in Manhattan. She was 67.

The cause was cancer, said Randi Stein, a longtime friend.

At her death, Professor Asch was the director of the Center for Ethics and the Edward and Robin Milstein professor of bioethics at Yeshiva University in Manhattan. She also held professorships in epidemiology and population health and in family and social medicine at Yeshiva’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

“She certainly was one of the pioneers in disability studies,” Eva Feder Kittay, a distinguished professor of philosophy at Stony Brook University and a scholarly colleague of Professor Asch’s, said in an interview. “She was a very strong voice, always bringing in the disability perspective, trying to change the view of disability as some tragedy that happens to someone, rather than just another feature and fact about human existence.”

Professor Asch, who was trained as a philosopher, social worker, social psychologist and clinical psychotherapist, produced scholarship that stood at the nexus of bioethics, disability studies, reproductive rights and feminist theory.

She maintained that the lives of disabled women should be as much a feminist concern as those of able-bodied ones. Disabled women, she argued, had long been doubly marginalized: first because of their sex, and again because they failed to conform to a collective physical ideal — an ideal to which at least some able-bodied feminists subscribed.

Professor Asch’s scholarship centered in particular on issues of reproduction and the family. In an age of fast-moving reproductive technologies, she found that those concerns dovetailed increasingly with issues of disability rights.

She became widely known for opposing prenatal testing as a means of detecting disabilities, and abortion as a means of selecting babies without them.

Professor Asch supported a woman’s right to abortion. (She was a past board member of the organization now known as Naral Pro-Choice America.) But in her lectures, writings and television and radio appearances, she argued against its use to pre-empt the birth of disabled children. She argued likewise for prenatal testing.

For her, supporting abortion in general while opposing it in particular circumstances posed little ideological conflict. The crux of the matter, she argued, lay in the difference between a woman who seeks an abortion because she does not want to be pregnant and one who seeks an abortion because she does not want a disabled child.