One of the challenges faced by disabled women is society’s refusal to recognise them as potential parents and functional family units. This could be a result of social perceptions that consider disabled people to exist outside the boundaries of reproduction. The greatest of concerns seems to revolve around their perceived inability to raise a child and their presumed incompetence.
Cases where children are taken away from disabled parents because they are deemed unfit, sometimes with legal procedures starting prenatally, are widely reported in research. Consequently, disabled mothers potentially experience a lack of autonomy, they are not involved in decision-making, not asked for their opinions and their voices are not heard.
Professionals, as well as the family court system, are known to operate from the aspect of the deficit model of disability. Such model views disabled parents as inappropriate and incompetent for the role of parenting. Disabled parents are seen as offering a not ‘good enough’ type of parenting, falling short of the ideal parenting benchmarks.
This is reflected in narratives of disabled mothers, who admit to experiencing increased pressure, often as a result of social expectations. They claim that the less society perceives you as capable to parent, the higher the expectations are set for your parenting role.
Reproductive control and parenting support are both highly gendered arenas in which women bear an unequal burden.
Furthermore, gendered norms and structures, such as educational and employment opportunities, render disabled women potentially more vulnerable to perceived and actual parenting challenges. Their role as mothers tends to be overshadowed by inter-related problems, such as low income, the risk of more-than-average health problems and ineffective professional support and social networks.
Disabled mothers often carry the responsibility of the safety of their children, they are also responsible for choosing safe partners and for regulating their partner’s behaviour. Ultimately, mothers are held culpable when any type of family violence or breakdowns occur, even when they themselves are the victims. This responsibility is particularly onerous when we consider that disabled women are far more likely than other groups of women to be victims of sexual, psychological, economic and physical violence.
Although the parental role is seen as a leap forward for disabled people’s rights, and it is reported in the media as an exceptional life event, disabled mothers claim that their needs as disabled parents are not met as necessary once they are navigating the parenting world and that society fails to provide mainstream services that are accessible for disabled parents.
Physical accessibility has been a mainstream issue for decades but disabled mothers often find that, after they have the baby, most of the things you are expected to do as a mother are not accessible.
Reproductive control and parenting support are both highly gendered arenas in which women bear an unequal burden- Claire Azzopardi Lane
Examples of inaccessible venues and services range from privately owned venues used as mother and baby clubs to venues used for the state run services. This arises from the fact that society does not think that disabled women can also be mothers.
Furthermore, the residue of eugenics-based beliefs continue to have profound repercussions on disabled persons. Because of the belief that disability is a personal tragedy, that is to be avoided at all costs, persons with genetic disabilities such as intellectual disability encounter substantial resistance because of the possibility their children would inherit their disability. Parents with intellectual impairments are seen as the least fit to parent. They are described as inherently incapable of adequate parenting and unable to benefit from parent education because of their intellectual impairment.
The overshadowing of intellectual impairment over other factors that may better predict parenting abilities, such as parent history of trauma, parental mental health and social support, is reported to have contributed to discriminatory child protection decision-making and legal outcomes regarding child custody.
In 1947, Mickelson determined that intellectual ability is not the sole predictor of parental competence and identified such factors as mental health, marital harmony and income as impacting parenting ability. This discredited the idea that one’s IQ was the sole predictor of child outcomes.
More recent research has demonstrated that IQ does not seem to have a direct impact on the parenting skills of those parents who receive support in their parenting role.
The high rate of involvement of parents with intellectual disability in the child protection system, not to mention how they are reported to be disproportionately likely to lose custody of their children, indicates a significant gap in effective services and supports for this group internationally.
Malta’s national disability policy makes direct reference to parenthood and confirms that persons with disability have the right to raise families, endorsing disabled parents’ rights to have access to goods, services and other kind of support that would ensure that they could fulfil their role as parents. The national disability strategy acknowledges that this subject has been “considered a taboo for way too long now”.
Claire Azzopardi Lane heads the Department of Disability Studies. Specialising in the field of disability and sexuality, Azzopardi Lane has worked in various sectors, including education and social care. Her doctoral research concerned elements of sexuality in people with intellectual disability in a Maltese context. She is also a board member of the Women’s Rights Foundation.