Women with Disabilities: Barriers and Facilitators to Accessing ...

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WOMEN WITH DISABILITIES: BARRIERS AND FACILITATORS TO ACCESSING SERVICES DURING PREGNANCY,CHILDBIRTH AND EARLY MOTHERHOODSchool of Nursing and Midwifery, Trinity College DublinMcDonnell observes that the impetus for this classification and numbergatheringreflected the perceived need to sequester ‘unfit’ people withincharitable institutions and schools that would impart some sort of ‘moral’ trainingand occupational skills to them and so avoid their becoming a ‘burden’ on thewider society (McDonnell, 2003:pg. 29). This historical period was dominated bythe ideology of the Poor Laws and the workhouse and the division between the‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor. McDonnell relates that, with the exception ofthe Stewart Institution which, from its inception in 1869, did have a cleareducational ethos, the common practice was to send those who were officiallytermed the ‘chronic and incurable classes’ (McDonnell, 2003:pg. 29) either tothe workhouse or to a kind of custodial asylum. After Independence, peoplewere sent to county homes and mental hospitals. This form of ‘disabilityapartheid’ was ‘carefully organised’ (Conroy, 2003:pg. 45).Through most of the twentieth century, individual service providers and, later,local health boards did collect some data on the incidence of disability, but itwas not standardised nor was it redirected into a national database. Insteadthere was a gap of 91 years between the 1911 Census and the 2002 Census,with no population-based enumeration of people dealing with any form ofdisability or impairment (Doyle, 2003:pg. 11-12).2.3.2. Inclusion of disability statistics in national CensusIn 1996, the Commission on the Status of People with Disabilities called forimproved data and statistics (Commission on the Status of People withDisabilities, 1996) to enhance service planning and provision for people withdisabilities. Thus, the Central Statistics Office put in place questions ondisability for the 2002 Census, emerging with an overall figure of 323,707 or8.3% of people in the state identifying themselves as having a long-lastinghealth problem or a disability, of which 171,901 were women (CSO, 2004a).The CSO also conducted a survey on disability in Quarter 2, 2002 as a moduleof its Quarterly National Household Survey (QNHS) which concentrates onemployment activity. The QNHS in 2002 recorded 10.3% of all people aged 15-11
WOMEN WITH DISABILITIES: BARRIERS AND FACILITATORS TO ACCESSING SERVICES DURING PREGNANCY,CHILDBIRTH AND EARLY MOTHERHOODSchool of Nursing and Midwifery, Trinity College Dublin64 reporting a disability/health problem (CSO, 2004b). This module wasrepeated in Quarter 1 in 2004 with very little change in the numbers reporting adisability, 10.9% of all people surveyed, numbering 298,300 in all, with justunder half of those (142,500) being women. Only 37% of this 298,300 were inemployment compared with 63.8% for the total population (CSO, 2004b). Thesefigures have implications for the poverty and continuing social exclusion facedby people living with a disability, the vast majority of whom do not have anearned income because access to the labour market is so poorly supported(Conroy, 2003:pg. 48). The CSO intends to repeat the QNHS at intervals, whichwill build up longitudinal data on employment patterns that will constitute onemeasure of the effectiveness, or otherwise, of social inclusion policies.2.3.3. Development of expanded Census categories exploringdisabilityThis initial CSO QNHS data provided useful interim figures on the extent ofdisability in Ireland, while the National Disability Authority piloted an in-depthdata collection exercise for a post-Census survey of those registeringthemselves on the Census returns as having a disability (Doyle, 2003:pg. 11-12). This work complemented that of the Statistics Board, carried out inconjunction with the Department of An Taoiseach, to develop data collectiontools to cover anyone affected by any of the 9 grounds for discriminationidentified in the Employment Equality Act, 1998 and the Equal Status Act, 2000(Doyle, 2003:pg. 12).The work of framing more sensitised questions, which included consultationwith service users and interested Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs),resulted in the 2006 Census using an expanded number of categories toexplore disability in questions 15 and 16 of the Census form (CSO, 2007a). Thecategories were as follows:-Blindness, deafness or a severe vision or hearing impairment-A condition that substantially limits one or more basic physical activities12
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