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

WOMEN WITH DISABILITIES: BARRIERS AND FACILITATORS TO ACCESSING SERVICES DURING PREGNANCY,CHILDBIRTH AND EARLY MOTHERHOODSchool of Nursing and Midwifery, Trinity College Dublinsocial and professional taboo. In today’s context some people suggest that thedrug-induced suppression of sexual desire and the production ofhyperprolactinaemia in women, with its impact on fertility, is another more subtleway of maintaining existing power relations and enforcing reproductive control,under the guise of therapy (Vandereycken, 1993; Deegan, 1999). Indeed,Vandereycken (1993) suggests that the image of people having no control overtheir sexual drives, especially women who experience psychosis, is a factor thatinfluences support for the use of drugs to suppress sexual desire.2.6.1.3. Separation of mothers from childrenHoward (2000) examined, from a historical perspective, the separation ofmothers with mental illness from their children. He noted that psychiatrictextbooks, written in the first half of the century, predominantly by malepsychiatrists, advocated the complete and prompt separation of ill mothers fromtheir children, with little or no reference to the impact of such separation oneither mother or child. Grunebaum et al (1975) attribute this practice to anumber of beliefs dominant in psychiatric thinking at the time: the belief arisingout of psychoanalytic theory that the mother’s illness was partly due to herhostility towards her child, a belief that the mother was potentially dangerouswith homicidal or suicidal tendencies, and a concern that the presence of ayoung child on a psychiatric ward would upset the management of the ward.The notion of the ‘schizophrenogenic mother’, put forward by Fromm-Reichmann as a cause of schizophrenia, gave further support to the belief thatmothers who experienced mental health difficulties were dangerous and shouldbe separated (Howard, 2000).In the culture that stigmatised single mothers and even more so mothers withmental illness, many mothers with mental illness were forced in an atmosphereof secrecy and shame to give up their children. Often, it was considered kinderand easier if the mother never saw the child they were giving up for adoption.Therefore, not infrequently, these mothers gave birth under general anaestheticand had their babies taken away immediately. In addition, documentation about26