The Promise We Made to Americans with Disabilities Is Under Attack

Exterior of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1999. —Universal History Archive—Getty ImagesIn the past, Americans with disabilities were sent off to large, isolating, state-run institutions as a matter of course. In overcrowded, understaffed facilities, residents were too often neglected and stripped of privacy, autonomy, or any meaningful connection to their communities. When these conditions were brought to light, they sparked national outrage. That reckoning helped galvanize the deinstitutionalization movement, a decades-long push to create services that support people with disabilities in their homes and communities. Decades of advocacy to “deinstitutionalize” have fortunately transformed quality of life for people with disabilities, but it wasn’t until just 27 years ago that the Supreme Court's 1999 decision in Olmstead v. Lois Curtis made it so disabled Americans could rest easy knowing forced segregation wasn’t inevitable. For much of our history, few options existed between mass institutionalization in expensive and confining facilities on one end of the spectrum, and fully independent living absent any supports on the other end of the spectrum. The legal precedent rooted in Olmste...