Human rights protection for obese urged
With rates of severe obesity quadrupling in Canada, a provocative line of thinking is emerging to give groundbreaking new human rights to the obese.
Obesity isn’t a disease of laziness or complacency, something that can be fixed if people simply “try harder,” but an issue of human rights, a national conference on obesity heard on Thursday.
“We need a fundamental shift in our norms and in our regulation in addressing obesity,” Bill Bogart, a professor of law at the University of Windsor, told the fourth annual Canadian Obesity Summit in Toronto.
That includes moving away from the stigmatization of fat people toward acceptance of people “in a variety of shapes and sizes,” he said, and laws protecting people with obesity from discrimination or prejudice.
One approach would be to treat obesity as a “disability,” he said.
However, “many fat people do not regard themselves as disabled or ill,” he said. “They want to be judged on merits, not measurements.”
Human rights legislation could be amended by adding the term “obesity” as a new category of freedom from discrimination, he said. Or the laws could be amended to ban “appearance” bias — prohibiting discrimination solely based on how a person looks.
Either way, “It would mean that complainants would no longer have to try to characterize obesity as a disability,” Bogart, author of the book, Regulating Obesity? Government, Society and Questions of Health, said in an interview. “They could simply say, ‘I am an obese person and I have been discriminated against because I’m an obese person.’ ”
Marty Enokson says he experiences discrimination daily. Before undergoing bariatric surgery six-and-ahalf years ago, he weighed 505 pounds. He is now down to 370 pounds. “I’m still considered a very obese man,” said Enokson, a paralegal in the Crown prosecutor’s office in Edmonton. “But I can bend over. I can tie my shoes now. I can climb up six flights of stairs at work.”
Obesity can be disabling, Enokson said. “Try moving your body when it’s 505 pounds.” At his heaviest, he was taking 40 mg of OxyContin four times a day for the pain, “just to be able to move around.” A year ago, he ended up in hospital with pneumonia. The emergency doctor told him he had pneumonia because he was “morbidly” obese — a term Enokson hates. “The medical world created a whole new way of shaming a fat person.”
But, “I don’t ever want to be perceived as disabled. I don’t want people to feel sorry for me. That’s the most important thing,” he said. “I want to be treated the same. Yes, I’m obese. Yes, I’m fat. Whatever you want to call me, I am that. But it doesn’t define who I am.”
In Canada, severe obesity has increased by more than 400 per cent over the past three decades, the conference heard. Today, an estimated 1.2 million Canadians have a body mass index, or BMI, of 35 or more.
As norms change, the law has a role in reflecting the shifting of those societal norms, Bogart told the obesity conference.
“Think of same-sex marriage, its dated attitudes in 1965, and think of where we are as we sit here, in 2015,” he said. “As attitudes and behaviours change, the law also moved more or less in the same direction.”
In Europe, obesity has already been deemed a disability. In December, the European Court of Justice ruled in favour of a Danish childcare worker who said he was fired because of his weight. According to British news reports, the man, who weighed 350 pounds, said he was let go after he could not bend down to tie his shoes.
The court held that people who are obese can be considered “disabled” and thus protected from discrimination, Bogart said. But the court stopped short of saying at what weight a person could claim disability.
In Canada, obesity is not a specifically protected ground in human rights codes, unlike sex, sexual orientation, religion and race.
However, “imaginative lawyers,” he said, have argued successfully that obesity is a form of disability “because disability is a protected ground and is broadly defined.”