The present study aims to analyze the experiences of women with disabilities in Poland with regard to motherhood and reproduction. The research is situated within the field of critical disability studies, which goes beyond the social model of disability, incorporating such concepts as ableism, embodiment, locality, and intersectionality. The latter concept provides a theoretical framework for the feminist analysis of intersecting social positionality, in this case: gender and disability. The research employs the concepts of reproductive autonomy, stratified reproduction, and reproductive justice to explore complex practices of negotiating autonomy and subversion of ableist norms by women with disabilities. By doing so, it engages with questions on who can be a parent and who decides upon that.
The research questions address how women with disabilities practice motherhood, experience childlessness, what challenges they face in the reproductive realm, and how they cope with them. Thus, the study engages with the understanding of the relationship between reproductive decisions and disability, construction of norms in the parenthood of persons with disabilities, and the role of social, cultural, and structural factors in shaping these experiences. The research is based on the qualitative analysis of individual in-depth interviews and three group interviews with fifty women with physical or sensory disabilities. The study applies feminist and enabling methodologies.
The results situate the motherhood of women with disabilities in relation to the organizing concepts: accessibility, family practices, impairment effects, surveillance, and institutionalized ableism. I analyze articulations of mothers with disabilities' experiences that revolve around these categories, pointing out tensions between accessibility and agency, autonomy and interdependence, privacy, and relations with institutions. The analysis of childlessness of disabled women focuses on women’s vision of parenthood within the expected life trajectory, embodiment and perceived impairment effects on reproductive decision-making, as well as social control mechanisms that sustain childlessness among women with disabilities. The reproductive experiences of women with disabilities are discussed in the context of their position on the labor market, housing situation, and freedom from violence as key elements for reproductive justice and independent living, which allows to show the structural factors and their relation to the social transformations around gender and disability.
polski