3:23am July 10, 2014

Rights of Parents with Disabilities

Make your voices heard at the National Council on Disability’s “Rocking the Cradle: Ensuring the Rights of Parents with Disabilities and Their Children” Congressional Forum. The event is open to the public and written testimony will accepted for two weeks after the event. Why is this important?

Robyn Powell, Attorney Advisor at the National Council on Disability, writes in “Can Parents Lose Custody Simply Because They Are Disabled?” that “removal rates where parents have a psychiatric disability have been found to be as high as 70 percent to 80 percent; where the parent has an intellectual disability, 40 percent to 80 percent.” In addition, she writes, “parents who are deaf or blind report extremely high rates of child removal and loss of parental rights.”

This Huffington Post article covers only a small fraction of how the rights of parents with disabilities are substantially less in the eyes of society and law - simply because of disability. Disability, ipso facto, does not make one unfit to parent. Too many factors go into parenting, and it says significant things about how society views disability when it is the reason for a child being taken from their parent(s).

It is a carryover from when eugenics was at its height, in the 1920s and 1930s. Eugenics posited that people with disabilities and mental illnesses, and often those deemed outcasts or misfits by society, would produce burdensome offspring. The number of women sterilized, or rendered incapable of producing children through surgical means, outnumbered the amount of men vastly and even now women with disabilities are not seen as fit mothers. A famous example is Carrie Buck. She was the plaintiff in Buck v. Bell, an orchestrated test case culminating in the 1927 Supreme Court ruling that a Virginia statute concerning the sterilization of individuals in institutions and prisons was constitutional. What does it say that the entirety of Buck v. Bell has never been overturned, even today?

We are no longer in the 1920s and 1930s, and the ingrained ableism still persists into the modern day. The statistics listed by Powell, and the countless cases in which children are removed from parents with disabilities, says among other things that:

The disabled are not fit to bear children, nor raise them.

People with disabilities should not have the same rights as non-disabled parents, because they are inherently less.

Children need to be protected and raised away from people with disabilities.

Some people may protest, once the concept of eugenics is explained to them, that they’re not like that. They don’t support things like that. Yet by either failing to act in defense of, or supporting the removal of children from parents with disabilities, they are playing into the very legacy of eugenics.