On Friday, July 25th from 9:00-11:30 a.m. Eastern, NCIL Disability and Aging Specialist Lindsay Baran will provide testimony at the National Council on Disability’s Congressional Forum: “Rocking the Cradle: Ensuring the Rights of Parents with Disabilities and Their Children” at the Rayburn House Office Building, Room B-318, in Washington, DC.
2014 marks the 24th anniversary of the passage of the ADA. Many members of the “ADA generation” are now at the age where they want to start families of their own, but find themselves faced with a different kind of discrimination, one that hinders or even prevents adults with disabilities from beginning or raising their own families.
With an increasing number of people with disabilities taking advantage of protections to obtain an education and go to work, combined with a large number of service members returning from tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan with newly-acquired disabilities — parents with disabilities continue to be the only distinct community that has to fight to retain and sometimes gain custody of their own children without any other cause.
NCIL was responsible for bringing the issues surrounding parenting with a disability to the attention of NCD, which prompted their 2012 report “Rocking the Cradle: Ensuring the Rights of Parents with Disabilities and Their Children”. It is extremely important that we keep elected officials informed and build on our momentum.
Take Action
Please contact your Representative and both your Senators and encourage them to send members of their staff to this forum on one of the most pressing and emerging issues of importance to the disability community in recent years.
More Information
I was born in 1977 and then diagnosed in the early 80’s and then diagnosed with a physically debilitating condition.
I am now 37 years old. I’m unable to have children of my own but I am fully aware of the fight that disabled individuals have to go through to keep their children.
It’s a disgrace, in this day an age, that there are no laws that protect the disabled from losing their children, just because they’re disabled!
I’d like to adopt one day but I know I’d have a slim to none chance on having that dream fulfilled.
I was very young when the ADA was enacted. My mother went time to tons of meetings, groups, rallies and more in order to support the enactment of the ADA.
The progression of my condition makes it very difficult to get around but I do my part through social media and online websites to help with anything concerning the disabled.
My passion lies with the most over-looked population of the disabled…Nursing home resident’s.
My Facebook page, Surviving Nursing Home Life, does exactly what the title suggests. I help resident’s, their family and friends, learn to survive living in a facility.
I hope that our supposed “leaders” realize soon that our disabilities do not define who we are and how we live our lives.