The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2023

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2023 85 Donna Scaramastra Gorman’s articles have appeared in Time Magazine , Newsweek , The Washington Post , the Christian Science Monitor , and the FSJ . A Foreign Service spouse and former associate editor for the Journal , she has lived in Amman, Moscow, Yerevan, Almaty, Beijing, and Northern Virginia. D isability rights activist and author Judith Heumann, 75, died in Wash- ington, D.C., on March 4, 2023. Often called “the mother of the disability rights movement” by activists around the world, Ms. Heumann served as the State Department’s first special adviser on international disability rights from 2010 to 2017, a position that was created after the U.S. signed the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (Disabilities Treaty). In her role as adviser, Heumann traveled to numerous overseas posts to meet with people with disabilities, civil society organizations, and government officials, teaching others to champion and advocate for disability rights in their countries. Heumann also worked to ensure that the needs of people with A Prime Mover for Disability Rights Judith Heumann 1947–2023 APPRECIATION BY DONNA SCARAMASTRA GORMAN disabilities would be addressed in international emergency situations and coordinated the interagency process for ratifica- tion of the Disabilities Treaty. Sadly, the U.S. remains one of a few countries that still have not ratified the treaty. In a 2016 TED talk, Heumann pushed for the U.S. Senate to “do its job” and ratify the treaty, reminding her audi- ence that they should join the fight for disabled rights. “Disability is a family you can join at any point in your life,” she added. After Ms. Heumann’s death, State Department spokesperson Ned Price released a statement: “To say Judy was instrumental in the disability rights movement is an understatement. She embodied the collective fight for the rights of all people with disabilities throughout a multitude of roles and platforms— legal, political, and social. Legislation such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities would not exist without Judy’s leadership alongside her pio- neering fellow advocates.” Ms. Heumann was born in 1947 to parents who fled Nazi Germany as children; her grandparents and other family mem- bers were murdered in the Holocaust. When she contracted polio as a toddler and lost the use of her legs, her parents refused to institutionalize her, perhaps, as she wrote in her