K. E. J. wants children someday. She says she will "love taking care of them." She is said to own a home and possess a substantial sum of money. K. E. J. is not apparently involved with a man or planning to become pregnant in the near future.
K. E. J. also has a traumatic brain injury. As a result, her legal guardian, who is also her aunt, wanted her to have her fallopian tubes tied. K. E. J. doesn't want to be surgically sterilized, so her aunt took her to court, where her petition for sterilization was denied. The groundbreaking decision sets a precedent guaranteeing people with disabilities a court hearing in such cases.
The argument in court, however, was not over whether or not K. E. J. should be permitted to have children, but over whether or not this particular surgical form of sterilization was in her best interest. The judge noted that far less invasive birth control methods are available to prevent a mentally incompetent ward from becoming pregnant, while K. E. J.'s aunt argued that her niece had previously reacted poorly to other methods of birth control. Whether or not K. E. J. will be permitted to refuse other methods of birth control, should she become involved with a man and wish to bear children, is unclear.
Left: A Nazi propaganda poster displays the flags of countries with compulsory sterilization laws, and proclaims, "We do not stand alone."
Throughout modern history, women with disabilities have fought for the right to motherhood. Between 1897 and 1981, over 65,000 people were forcibly sterilized in the United States, in the interest of eugenics. Conditions that served as grounds for compulsory sterilization included mental illness, intellectual disabilities, epilepsy, blindness, deafness, and physical deformities. While forced sterilization laws are no longer used to sterilize people in institutions or as grounds for automatic sterilization of persons with certain conditions, the legal guardian of a person with a disability can act as did K. E. J's aunt, and request the surgical sterilization of a disabled ward.
The American Association of Persons with Disabilities also alleges that the eugenics movement is alive and well, albeit in a slightly different form: Selective abortion of fetuses found to have disabling conditions. According to the AAPD, "The right to abort a disabled child... is approaching the status of a duty to abort a disabled child." Indeed, United Kingdom parents who are culturally deaf and wish to intentionally select for deaf embroyos when using in vitro fertilization are now backed into a corner by laws that require the selection of a "normal" embryo if one is available. KaraSwims reports that the public perceives stories of people with disabilities having and parenting children as "breaking news," rather than the norm. WheelchairDancer recently blogged about an article in the Guardian, in which a community worker describes his unfriendly feelings toward a pregnant, married woman with a developmental disability.
And yet, day by day, throughout the world, mothers with disabilities, like SweetiesMom, raise their able-bodied and disabled children successfully, with the same love, blood, sweat, and tears that goes into an able-bodied mother's parenting efforts.
