Ms Maria Ní Fhlatharta:

I will touch on both legal capacity and abortion and will try to do so quite quickly. On gender-based services, including abortion, the services, laws and policies seem surprised that disabled people exist once they are commenced, despite our having fed in to the legislative process a lot, particularly around the abortion Act. All these things are designed around the idea that whoever will present for a service will be a non-disabled, likely middle class, likely a white woman. That is not the demographic of the people who rely on these services. Services are shocked when someone turns up and requires a hoist or when all these barriers are put in place. If something is designed with disability and disabled women in mind from the outset, if that approach is at the core and disabled people's voice's are consulted, the result is a system that does not just benefit disabled people but which will be more generally accessible to everyone. It is particularly clear in the abortion Act. We were very clear when the termination of pregnancy Bill was going through the Dáil, as were Inclusion Ireland and the Disability Federation and other organisations, that the three-day wait period would create a barrier, as would strong gestational limits and that we did not know how it would interact with legal capacity and that would be a barrier. Ultimately, the only time disability was mentioned was when it concerned potential foetal screening and selection, completely ignoring the lived reality of disabled women. The exact same thing happened with the assisted human reproduction Act and absolutely everything that pertained to reproduction, parenting and disability.

On legal capacity and adult safeguarding, safeguarding is important but currently the system completely denies the agency and rights of disabled people and particularly disabled women. While we need to protect everyone from abuse, the current system ignores the will and preferences of people and will ultimately always resort to substitute decision making. The Assisted Decision Making (Capacity) Act is a welcome improvement but it still has a provision that can and will deny disabled people their decision-making rights. We need to move towards the full supported decision making mechanism. There is so much talk about choice on International Women's Day but we completely fail to recognise the intricate and invasive ways that disabled women's choices are restricted, including in this really crude legal framework.