On September 27 the National Council on Disability released
an important document: Rocking the Cradle: Ensuring the Rights of Parents with
Disabilities and Their Children. I spent most of last night reading the report.
Nothing I read was surprising to me because many of the barriers and blatant
bias described in detail I experienced first hand. Here is the link: http://www.ncd.gov/publications/2012/Sep272012/
The NCD Executive Summary states:
The goal of this report is to
advance understanding and promote the rights of parents with disabilities and
their children. The report provides a comprehensive review of the barriers and
facilitators people with diverse disabilities—including intellectual and
developmental, psychiatric, sensory, and physical disabilities—experience when
exercising their fundamental right to create and maintain families, as well as
persistent, systemic, and pervasive discrimination against parents with
disabilities. The report analyzes how U.S. disability law and policy apply to
parents with disabilities in the child welfare and family law systems, and the
disparate treatment of parents with disabilities and their children.
Examination of the impediments prospective parents with disabilities encounter
when accessing assisted reproductive technologies or adopting provides further
examples of the need for comprehensive protection of these rights.
The
report detailed twenty finding and made many recommendations. Below are direct
quotes from the report’s twenty findings.
FINDING
1: There are few accurate and comprehensive sources of information on the prevalence
of parents with disabilities.
FINDING
2: The child welfare system is ill-equipped to support parents with
disabilities and their families, resulting in disproportionately high rates of
involvement with child welfare services and devastatingly high rates of parents
with disabilities losing their parental rights.
FINDING
3: Parents with disabilities who are engaged in custody or visitation disputes
in the family law system regularly encounter discriminatory practices.
FINDING
4: Parents with disabilities who are involved in dependency or family
proceedings regularly face evidence regarding their parental fitness that is
developed using inappropriate and unadapted parenting assessments. Resources
are lacking to provide adapted services and adaptive parenting equipment, and
to teach adapted parenting techniques.
FINDING
5: Prospective adoptive parents with disabilities face significant barriers to
adopting children, both domestically and internationally.
FINDING
6: People with disabilities face significant barriers to receiving assisted
reproductive technologies (ART), despite its importance for many people with
disabilities who want to procreate.
FINDING
7: Personal assistance services (PAS) are a crucial support for many people
with disabilities but usually may not be used to assist them with their
parenting activities.
FINDING
8: Parents with disabilities face significant barriers to obtaining accessible,
affordable, and appropriate housing for their families.
FINDING
9: Many parents with disabilities face barriers to traveling with their
families using paratransit services.
FINDING
10: Parents with disabilities have significantly less income and more
frequently receive public benefits.
FINDING
11: People with disabilities, especially women, face significant barriers to
receiving proper reproductive health care.
FINDING
12: Parents and prospective parents with disabilities face a significant lack
of peer supports.
FINDING
13: Social service providers regularly overlook the parenting role of their
consumers.
FINDING
14: Formal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) Part C Early
Intervention (EI) programs and other non-Part C early intervention and
prevention model programs are an appropriate service option for many children
of parents with disabilities.
FINDING
15: Parents with disabilities involved in dependency or family law proceedings
face significant barriers to retaining effective and affordable legal
representation.
FINDING
16: Centers for Independent Living (CILs), with appropriate training, can
provide services to parents with disabilities.
FINDING
17: Despite limited funding and little national attention given to parents with
disabilities and their families, a number of programs and support services have
begun to emerge across the nation; they must be replicated nationally to
provide consistent capacity to support parents with disabilities and their
children.
FINDING
18: The impact of disability on the integrity of American Indian/Alaskan Native
(AI/AN) families has been utterly neglected by professionals in the fields of
law, policy, and research.
FINDING
19: Federal legislation, similar to the Indian Child Welfare Act, must be
enacted to address the systemically disparate treatment faced by parents with
disabilities throughout the country.
FINDING
20: The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
(CRPD) reinforces the rights of people with disabilities to create and maintain
families.
These finding are not exactly
ground breaking but when listed together are a devastating reminder of the
significant barriers people such as myself encounter when they want to start and
maintain a family life. When I read the report last night I thought why did I
not read about this in the news. I did a quick online search and found many
groups support the NCD findings. All applaud the report and consider it an
important document, among them The Council For Exceptional Children, Autistic
Self Advocacy Network, Alaska Governor’s Council on Disabilities and Special
Education, United Cerebral Palsy and multiple Independent Living Centers too
numerous to mention. I am listing just a small fraction of the disability
groups that praised the NCD report.
Conspicuous by its absence is a
single major news outlet. Well, not really. One newspaper in the nation
mentioned the report—the Sacramento Bee. The New York Times and Wall Street
Journal did not even use the report as filler nor did a single newspaper in any
major city in the country. The Huffington Post—not a word. It is as though the
report was issued within the vacuum of space. Sadly, this does not surprise me
one bit. My son and the ADA came into existence within two years of each other.
As he has grew I saw how the ADA failed to gain any traction—that is the ADA
was the law of the land but there was no social mandate to follow the law. This
led my son to conclude at a young age no one cares. Why would he say this? Read
the findings above. He and I experienced many of the above findings. Not all
but many. So in the process of coming of age my son learned a lesson no father
wants his child to learn—no one cares. As he grew older he would often say
“Dad, the ADA is bull. Lip service is paid to the law. You and I are the only
people that care”. He was largely
correct. Of course some people care but this out of the norm. In my experience
most people will politely listen to others who state there is a need for
wheelchair access or a lift on a school bus or an elevator or a ramp or a curb
cut etc. Most will agree such access is the ideal. At some point however there
will be an awkward pause or silence. Someone will mention a tight budget,
another will bring up the words I have learned to dread—“reasonable
accommodations”. When this happens I know access is a lost cause. And this, the
complete lack of social demand for access, is what my son learned by the time
he was in first grade. As I fell asleep last night, I thought not much has
changed aside from the law, a law most Americans consider somehow different
from other civil rights legislation.
4 comments:
I wasn't surprised either when the report got no traction with traditional media. I put a link on my Facebook and on Disability Rights Maine's Facebook (which I mange for DRCME) and mostly nothing. I couldn't find any good articles to link to.
One FB friend did send me an inbox saying that people with disabilities have rights, but so do parents, and we must put the children first. I'm pretty sure she didn't read the report. Right.
I want adopt kids from foster care after I graduate. I've already been told by social services that I'm "not ideal" and I should wait until I'm married because a placement would be "more suitable" at that point. Add to that-I'm gay in a state where gay marriage isn't legal. In society's eyes there are many things about me that are considered less than ideal. I wonder if I'll ever be allowed to adopt and parent a child who needs a home.
Holden, I faced blatant bias as a father with a disability when my son was an infant. Health care professionals were the worst--I lost track of the number of times I was openly questioned about my ability to care for him. It was always couched in "the child's welfare must come first". I was also often asked if I had documentation I was the legal guardian.
I must confess I do not understand the opposition to gay marriage. Gay people fall in love and want to marry. Seems to be an ordinary desire as is wanting a child. I have no doubt you will encounter intense bias and needless obstacles adopting a child. This depressing assessment is proof we have a long way to go before people with a disability are really equal.
I think that the summary of the report that you presented is highly informative to the general public who will never read it. It is a report that could have been written by every single parent of a disabled kid with a high degree of congruence to the professional one...it's our experience. Now what to do?
@Holden, come and live in Massachusetts. We honor gay marriage and I think our experience is that gay and lesbian partners make as good, if not at times better, parents of adoptive kids. Many inspiring stories abound here. We are not without our extremists, but fewer come and live in this bastion of liberalism.
Phil, I wish I could take exception to your observation that the general population will never read the report. I would consider it mandatory ready for any healthcare professional that works with children.
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