"Historically and across societies, people with disabilities have been stigmatized and excluded from social opportunities on a variety of grounds. These justifications include assertions that people with disabilities are biologically defective, less than capable, costly to treat and employ, suffering, or fundamentally inappropriate for social inclusion. Rethinking the idea of disability so as to detach being disabled from inescapable disadvantage has been considered a key to the twenty-first century reconstruction of how disablement is best understood"--