(Radio Iowa) – A retired physician and educator from eastern Iowa is releasing a book about her experiences as the mother of a dependent 38-year-old son who has developmental and cognitive disabilities.

Maureen McCue, a former University of Iowa professor of public health and global health, says her book, “Dancing in a Disabled World,” starts off as a memoir but evolves into a call to action.

“Disability is all around us, but we act like it doesn’t exist,” McCue says. “We go about causing disability in indirect ways. It’s really hard, if you begin to look around, to say you know anybody who is -not- dealing with disability and yet, as a society, we tend to think of it as an anomaly as opposed to a commonality.”

McCue, who lives just outside Iowa City in Oxford, says the book is a study of what constitutes a disability and the roles disabilities play in everyone’s lives.

“We need, all of us, to pay some more attention to what we’re calling disability, from our ability-focused lifestyles,” McCue says, “as if we aren’t all just an accident of nature, of a car, of weather, you know, a disability away.”

Former U.S. Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa was the architect of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which became law in 1990. Known as the ADA, the wide-ranging civil rights law prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in many areas of public life. McCue’s research took her all over the world, to places like Ecuador, India, Haiti and Bangladesh.

“I love the fact that the U.S. passed the ADA, and in many countries that I’ve been in, people point to the ADA as a model,” McCue says, “but the ADA is like the Constitution, really, a living document that continues to need improvement, that continues to need expansion.”

McCue is scheduled to give a presentation at the Harkin Institute at Drake University in Des Moines on November 14th. Part of that discussion will focus on the “big picture” of disabilities, and part will zero in on her son. She says everyone with a disability also has many remarkable abilities.

“For my son, it’s his appreciation of music and his ability to hold on to music and seek music and dance,” McCue says. “More than the average adult, he’s driven by music.”

“Dancing in a Disabled World” is McCue’s second book, published by North Liberty-based Ice Cube Press. The first, “Birds in the Morning, Frogs at Night,” was featured on Radio Iowa in 2021.