ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the issues relevant to disabled women in anticipating and becoming mothers, and the key messages for midwives and other professionals involved in their care. It focuses on disability awareness and effective communication as fundamental in the delivery of care and support, in the context of legislative and organisational developments, which together seek to ensure equal access to services for all parents. Each individual person carries with them their own understanding of impairment and experience of disability, and may use 'medical model' or 'social model' language to express this, or indeed draw on their own and others' 'everyday' language to express the meaning and nature of their experience. Disabled parents are diverse not only in relation to the impairment experience, but also in relation to socio-economic position, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and their own life histories. Up until the 1990s disabled parents were largely invisible in accounts of human experience, research and practice.
