Rosa's Law
2010 United States law
Rosa's Law [1] is a United States law which replaced several instances of "mental retardation" in law with " intellectual disability ". The bill was introduced as S.2781 in the United States Senate on November 17, 2009, by Barbara Mikulski ( D - MD ). It passed the Senate unanimously on August 5, 2010, then the House of Representatives on September 22, and was signed into law by President Barack Obama on October 5. [2] The law is named for Rosa Marcellino, a girl with Down syndrome who was nine years old when it became law, and who, according to President Barack Obama , "worked with her parents and her siblings to have the words 'mentally retarded' officially removed from the health and education code in her home state of Maryland." [3]
Rosa's Law is part of a long line of changes that has been ongoing since the early 1900s. Words such as idiot and moron were common in court documents and diagnosis throughout the early 1900s. [4] In the 1960s, changes in the law led to the use of such terms as mental retardation . With the loss of idiot (IQ 0–25), imbecile (IQ 26–50) and moron (IQ 51–75), specific descriptors of IQ-based intelligence were abandoned because of negative public sentiment . Under Rosa's law, these would be described respectively as profound, severe, and moderate levels of intellectual disability.
See also
References
- ↑ Pub. L. 111-256 Archived 2021-03-01 at the Wayback Machine , 124 Stat. 2643 (2010).
- ↑ S.2781 Archived 2022-01-28 at the Wayback Machine on GovTrack. Accessed July 31, 2011.
- ↑ "Remarks by the President at the Signing of the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010" . whitehouse.gov . 8 October 2010. Archived from the original on 2021-03-09 . Retrieved 2021-03-03 – via National Archives .
- ↑ Feeble-Minded, South Dakota. Commission for Segregation and Control of (1940). Biennial Report of the Commission for Segregation and Control of the Feeble-Minded . Archived from the original on 2022-01-28 . Retrieved 2016-11-01 .
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