4 minute read
SPOTLIGHT ON GOOD WORKS
Alana Prochuk
Building Better Communities, one grant at a time
SPOTLIGHT ON GOOD WORKS Mothers in a Disabling Society: The Continued Struggle for Change
The challenge is extreme poverty. That is the biggest problem for me. I lost my WCB [appeal] recently. So, I get zero compensation, zero retraining, zero therapy, zero. – A mother with disabilities living in poverty Well when I was in the hospital and when I was pregnant, there was a social worker that came and she was talking to me. And she really . . . yeah, she really was not happy for me. She was, sort of like, thinking, Are you really thinking of your child? Like, “I think it would be best for your child if you gave the child up.” And I thought, I just delivered a child, I’m lying in bed, and you’re telling me this? I was devastated. – A mother with cerebral palsy Those are just two of the many powerful firsthand experiences shared by participants in West Coast LEAF’s 2014 “Mothering with Disabilities Project,” funded in part by The Notary Foundation of BC.
This law reform project was launched to address a gap in research on the systemic barriers to equality faced by women with disabilities in relation to parenting. Our interviews with 25 diverse mothers with disabilities confirmed that discriminatory attitudes about parenting ability can create obstacles to reproductive choice, adoption, and fairness in family law and child protection for these women.
Furthermore, the economic insecurity disproportionately experienced by women with disabilities
©iStockphoto.com/Shalatea
undermines their access to the legal system and to basic necessities for themselves and their children, including housing, child care, and nutritious food. As a result, women with disabilities may have their children apprehended by the child protection system because of a lack of resources and support, not because of abuse or neglect.
The struggles are compounded for mothers who also experience inequalities based on indigenous identity, race, sexual orientation, and other aspects of their identity.
The Mothering with Disabilities Project culminated in our “Able Mothers” report that set out our research and many recommendations for changes to laws and policies to better support women with disabilities. Its overarching recommendation was for governments to provide all necessary supports to ensure that children can remain with their parents when that is in the best interests of the children.
In the 2½ half years since “Able Mothers” was first published, what work has West Coast LEAF done to advance the goal? •
In collaboration with Community
Legal Assistance Society, First
Call Child & Youth Advocacy
Coalition, and other advocates, we continued pushing for an end to the clawback of child support payments from families receiving income assistance and disability assistance benefits. West Coast
LEAF and our allies were heartened when this clawback was finally eliminated in September 2015 and a key recommendation from “Able Mothers” became a reality.
Building on the work of the
Community Legal Assistance
Society and others, we called on the BC Government to abolish yet another clawback impacting mothers with disabilities:
The deduction of maternity and parental EI benefits from assistance payments received by parents who are designated as Persons with
Disabilities (PWD). In our view, the clawback exacerbated the barriers to reproductive choice and employment that women with disabilities already face, as documented in “Able Mothers.”
We were again heartened when the clawback was eliminated in October 2016.
We joined with other human rights organizations to issue a press release calling for an increase to social assistance rates in BC.
The current low rates entrap many single mothers and their children in deep poverty and increase the risk of needless child apprehensions.
We called for changes to the definitions of spouse and dependent in BC’s disability and income assistance legislation that are out of sync with other laws and result in many women with disabilities being unfairly denied benefits and forced into economic dependency on others. Women who lack access to their own financial resources have limited choice in relationships and a reduced ability to flee abuse. As part of our advocacy for affordable, high-quality child care, we published “High Stakes,” a report about the human rights consequences of BC’s inadequate child care system for women and children, including harms to the health of mothers with disabilities and chronic illnesses.
Thanks to the support of The Notary Foundation and other generous funders, West Coast LEAF has been able to document some of the law and policy issues that create barriers for mothers with disabilities and to identify concrete changes that are needed in our society to protect those women’s rights as parents.
But so much remains to be done to bring about the reforms we know are needed. West Coast LEAF hopes you will support our efforts to create a society where no family is ever torn apart because of a lack of resources for parents. s Alana Prochuk manages West Coast LEAF’s public legal education programming. West Coast LEAF (Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund) is BC’s first and only organization dedicated to advancing women’s equality through the law. education@westcoastleaf.org westcoastleaf.org Twitter: @WestCoast_LEAF Facebook: WestCoastLEAF
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