About

Persons with disabilities in Europe are still suffering under societal bias, inaccessible infrastructure, and unsupportive behaviours from people without disabilities. Mothers with disabilities in particular constitute a focus group often ignored by policymakers, academic researchers, and healthcare professionals. 

Disability in this context is understood as physical, sensory, intellectual, and mental. Physical disabilities include mobility impairments, while sensory disabilities refer to poor or absent senses of vision, hearing, and speech. Intellectual disabilities are life-long conditions of slow intellectual development that cannot be treated with medication. Finally, mental disabilities refer to mental disorders that can be treated with medication, therapy, or other methods. 

2

By accompanying, advising, and supporting women in their journey to motherhood, healthcare professionals are a crucial figure in a mother’s life and decision making. Regrettably, women with disabilities report frequent cases of discrimination and discouragement by doctors, nurses, paramedics, and psychologists. Women with disabilities are often denied fertility services prior to pregnancy, and when they become pregnant, they are subjected to pressure in order to abort the pregnancy or to give up the new-born for adoption. According to Perez et al. (2023, p. 16), one out of twenty children born to a mother with intellectual disability is given to social services immediately after birth. In multiple cases, medical professionals rush to characterise the pregnancy of a women with disability as “high risk” (Camilleri Zahra, ibid.). The perception of women with a disability having automatically high risk pregnancies in combination with poor pre-natal care leads to a disproportionately high prevalence of C-sections among mothers with intellectual disabilities (Perez et al., pp. 15 and 18). Also frequent are the cases of forced sterilisations of women with disabilities (European Disabilities Forum, 2022). It is thus evident that the dominant practices of many healthcare professionals in the developed world are leading to limiting women with disabilities’ right and equal access to a safe pregnancy and to motherhood. 

Those practices directly contradict the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), whose articles 12, 16, 17, and 23 stipulate the equal legal capacity of persons with disability, the states’ obligation to protect disabled persons from violence, the latter’s’ right to physical and mental integrity as well as their right to start a family. 

In the light of this analysis the project ASSIST aims to:

  • help create welcoming and inclusive healthcare services for mothers and women with disabilities through the training of students of medical departments and of healthcare professionals with the help of a highly innovative Digital Ecosystem.
  • implement a holistic approach in order to provide a forward-looking training curriculum for future and current healthcare providers and also carry out outreach and advocacy activities in order to build the capacity of NGOs to contribute to policy change.
  • foster a more positive, welcoming, and inclusive behaviour of medical professionals treating mothers with disabilitiy since social factors and attitudes affect parenthood experience of mothers with disabilities to a much greater extent than their disabilities do

Note on methodology: The project will embrace the “Disability-Inclusive Communication Guidelines” released by the United Nations.