Miguel and Itzíar are a blind couple. They have a six-year-old daughter and, since the girl was born, they have felt a constant social judgment. What bothers Miguel the most is that they question his ability to be a father. He explains it with a graphic example: “When we accompany the girl down the street and she rides her bike, we let her go a few meters, but we have taught her to stop when we ask her to. While we walk behind with the cane, it often happens that people say: ‘My daughter, separate, two blind people are coming,’ even if the street is empty. In other words, they would never think that the girl could have blind parents; “They are less surprised to see a six-year-old girl alone in the street than to think that she could be our daughter,” he says.
The mother, Itziar, suffers particularly when the burden of care is transferred to the daughter: “From a very young age, our daughter has received comments like ‘you have to take care of your parents, guide them or help them’. I remember one time I had an argument with a man because he had scolded him while we were walking together in the street and I was confused at the crossroads. The man said to him: ‘But how do you carry your mother like that, the crossroads are ahead!’ I got angry and told him that the girl was six years old and that I was the one taking care of her, not she taking care of me,” explains Itziar.
An ONCE study published this summer specifically addresses the challenges and needs of visually impaired mothers and fathers. It points out that such families suffer from “discrimination based on false premises,” such as considering blind people “as asexual people, therefore having no interest in reproducing”; classifying these people as “dependent, needy and therefore unable to fulfill the caregiver role that child-rearing requires”; or assuming that as a disabled person, “their children will inherit it, which would represent an additional burden both for the person and their family or for society.”
All these convictions lead, according to the report, to “questioning the capacity and aptitude of visually impaired people to exercise a role of help to their own family, their immediate environment or to health professionals”.
The Spanish Committee of Representatives of People with Disabilities (CERMI) confirms that this type of prejudice can be extrapolated to people with any type of disability. Pilar Villarino, executive director of CERMI, begins by clarifying that “people with disabilities have the right to start a family, like all other people.” From there, she denounces that these types of families face two major challenges: “the lack of social awareness, especially among people who need greater support, such as people with intellectual disabilities, deafblind people, people with psychosocial disabilities or autistic people; and the additional economic cost associated with disability, due to the lack of employment, housing, education and social health care,” explains Villarino.
Tamara – whose name is used only in this report – is a 34-year-old woman who uses a wheelchair due to a spinal cord injury that occurred shortly before the birth of her son. They both live alone and for their two-year-old son, his mother’s wheelchair is “his safe place”. For Tamara, who has also felt this constant questioning, the key to survival has been “accepting outside help, for example by going to school, to the beach or to the park”. He highlights as possible improvements to benefit from greater support from the Administration: “Benefiting from environments fully adapted to reduced mobility, having home help services or personal assistants adapted to parenthood”. This would help her to be more independent and to experience motherhood more comfortably.
In Xisco Cercadillo’s case, too, the disability is sudden – occurring throughout life without appearing from birth. “In October 2017, when my children were 13 and 5 years old, I became profoundly bilaterally deaf. From that moment on, continuing to be a parent was very difficult. We had to adapt to each other, them to my hearing limitations and me to make an extra effort to regain the normality lost in a few seconds,” Xisco recalls. It was especially painful for him when his children questioned him: “They also participated in using my limits to judge my autonomy or authority over them, because, on many occasions, by not understanding the second or third communication, they “They disrespected me or even denied having said something offensive that I had heard,” he explains.
His family had professional support, from doctors and speech therapists, which is why for Xisco, access to resources at all times is essential: “Any measure adopted, whether political or economic, to improve the daily situation of any disability is positive. We must continue to provide resources to the associations and professionals who work for and for us,” he argues. One of the keys for him would be to also address mental health, by integrating psychology professionals into the work of the associations: “They could guide children and parents to normalize in the fastest and least violent way families that, like ours, “have suffered a sudden disability,” he says.
Focus on gender and mental health
For the representative of CERMI, Pilar Villarino, this reality has a clear gender reading: “Women with disabilities who want to start a family suffer a greater risk of discrimination and therefore social exclusion than men with disabilities and women without disabilities. Some serious collateral situations are non-consensual sterilization, forced abortion, forced removal of sons and daughters in cases of sudden disability or in cases of divorce, even in situations of gender-based violence,” he denounces.
Esperanza Iglesias agrees, part of the National Network of Women in Mental Health in Spain, which also knows women who have been encouraged to undergo sterilization or have a “therapeutic abortion.” “A person with mental health problems will always be treated as someone who is incapable of caring for a child. Above all, the possibility that these children will inherit mental illnesses seems irresponsible on the part of those who are considering having them. “You start by questioning their ability to be good fathers and mothers, or even trying to convince them to give up,” Iglesias explains.
In the event that you end up having children, the questioning is constant: “There are few possibilities to treat your child in your own way, without the interference of others and everyone’s opinion. The fact that there is surveillance and control even without it being requested calls into question the capacity and responsibility of these parents, both at a social and institutional level, and often also on the part of their own family. It is especially difficult when you think that children are in danger because they suffer from a mental disorder. “Many people I know have had their custody rights and even their visitation rights taken away,” denounces the spokesperson for the National Network of Women’s Mental Health in Spain.
In recent years, changes have occurred that indicate a certain normalization of these types of situations. Itziar and Miguel, the blind parents, recognize that in their immediate environment, disability is naturally assumed and that it is in encounters with strangers that judgment and hurtful comments arise. “The general assessment is very positive. In the educational centers where the girl went, we were always treated like another family, both the teachers and the families, but especially the children. At the doctor, at the library, in general, people react very well, they do not assume that we need help and wait for us to ask for it or ask for it respectfully,” explains Itziar.
Tamara has also noticed positive changes: “On a social and family level, I feel less and less challenged, because I have adapted and so have they. At first it was very difficult for me, everything was a challenge, but now what I notice most is that everything takes a lot of time. My son is perhaps more independent than other children his age and he helps me with everything he can. It is thanks to him that I have recovered so much and so well and that I am progressing so well,” concludes Tamara.
