Disability and State Sanctioned Violence

Nine-hundred and forty-three dollars. That’s the number. That’s the maximum federal SSI benefit. Eleven thousand three hundred sixteen dollars a year. The federal poverty line for a single adult is fifteen thousand and sixty. The gap is almost four grand. Disabled people on SSI don’t live near the poverty line. They live thirty-seven percent below it. You can’t work, or you can’t work enough, and the government hands you a check that guarantees you’ll never escape. That’s not a safety net. That’s a cage.

Eugenics isn’t just a history book. It’s not just Germany in the 1940s. It’s America. Sixty thousand forced sterilizations in the twentieth century. The Supreme Court said “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” That was 1927. Buck v. Bell. It’s still good law. The logic was simple. The “fit” survive. The “unfit” are eliminated. We used to do it with scalpels. Now we do it with calculators.

The rhetoric changed. The motivation didn’t. You don’t need to sterilize people if they can’t afford to reproduce. You don’t need to gas them if poverty kills them first. The violence moved from explicit to structural. The goal is the same. Ensure the “unfit” don’t survive, don’t reproduce, don’t exist. Eugenics didn’t end. It just put on a suit and went to work at the Social Security Administration.

Look at the structure. SSDI is insurance. You paid into it. You worked. You’re “deserving.”

SSI is welfare. You didn’t work enough. You’re “undeserving.”

SSDI benefits can reach almost four thousand dollars a month. SSI maxes out at $943. The poverty of SSI is the penalty for being deemed unfit for labor. SSDI rewards the “fit.” SSI punishes the “unfit.” That’s eugenic categorization built right into the benefit structure. If you can’t produce, you don’t deserve to live. That’s the message.

Historical eugenics used marriage laws to stop disabled people from reproducing. The SSI marriage penalty does the exact same thing. Two disabled people on SSI get $943 each. Total: $1,886. If they marry, they get $1,415. They lose $471 a month. Love costs them $5,652 a year. The system makes family formation financially impossible. That’s not a side effect. That’s eugenic marriage restriction by economic means. Don’t breed. Or we’ll starve you.

The asset limit is $2,000. It’s been $2,000 since 1989. Never adjusted for inflation. If you save for a wheelchair, you lose your income. If you inherit money, you lose your benefits. If you work even a little, you lose everything. The courts used to presume disabled people were incapable of parenting and their kids would be a financial burden on the state. The $2,000 limit is that exact logic. It prevents accumulation. It prevents independence. It prevents survival. The system punishes ambition. The system punishes hope.

Eugenics always targeted the margins. The poor. The non-white. The disabled. The intersection isn’t accidental. It’s the original design compounding. Marcus is thirty-four. He’s Black. He’s autistic. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama. He gets $943 a month. His rent is $600. He has $343 left for everything else. He can’t afford a car. He can’t afford therapy. He can’t afford to leave the apartment much. He’s trapped in a room in a city in a system that was designed to make him disappear. The eugenic logic applied to Black bodies in 1927. It applies to Black disabled bodies now. The target hasn’t changed. The method just got quieter.

When $943 can’t cover rent, where do you go? You end up in an institution. Institutions are where the sterilizations happened. Institutions are where the “unfit” were hidden. Poverty drives people back into the eugenic spaces. The pipeline from SSI poverty to institutionalization is the pipeline from economic eugenics to physical eugenics. You can’t afford to live in the community, so you’re locked in the facility. The cage just gets smaller.

Disabled people die twenty to thirty years earlier than non-disabled peers. Not from their disabilities. From poverty. From lack of healthcare. From lack of housing. From lack of food. From a system that pays them to die faster. The life expectancy gap isn’t a statistic. It’s a body count. It’s the outcome of the eugenics. It’s the proof that the system is working as designed.

COVID proved it. The pandemic showed exactly who we leave to die. Triage protocols deprioritized disabled patients. “Quality of life” assessments determined who got ventilators. Doctors decided that disabled lives weren’t worth saving. In 2020. Not 1927. The logic of elimination walked right into the ICU and pulled the plug. The eugenic rhetoric declined. The eugenic outcomes didn’t.

The FY 2026 budget proposes a 35% cut to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. Reductions in fair housing enforcement. These are the structures that keep disabled people alive and in community. Dismantling them isn’t budget efficiency. It’s removing the shields that prevent the “unfit” from being eliminated by neglect. The blade is getting sharper.

Sarah is twenty-eight. She has cerebral palsy. She lives in a studio apartment on Oak Street in Columbus, Ohio. She gets $943 a month. Her rent is $650. Her groceries are $200. Her utilities are $100. That leaves her with negative seven dollars for medicine, transportation, clothes, and a life. She can’t save. She can’t marry her boyfriend, Mark, who is also disabled, because they’d lose their benefits. She can’t work because if she earns over $85 a month, they start taking away her check. She’s an accomplished writer. She has a voice that could fill rooms. But she can’t focus when she’s living in constant survival mode. The anxiety of negative seven dollars eats the words. The panic of the next bill kills the sentences. The system that should support her is starving her instead. She has the talent. She doesn’t have the oxygen. She’s twenty-eight and she’s waiting to die. Not from her disability. From the poverty the state assigned to her. She is the body. The calculator is the cause.

Eugenics isn’t just sterilization. It’s any system designed to ensure certain people don’t survive. SSI is that system. The poverty is the feature. The marriage penalty is the reproduction ban. The asset limit is the leash. The institutionalization is the cage. The life expectancy gap is the body count. The COVID triage was the proof. The logic never left. The method changed. They don’t cut your tubes anymore. They cut your check. 

And the blood is right there on the calculator.

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