Dr. Áine Sperrin:

We find the following when we look our policy and from speaking to different childcare-related professionals. We come at this from the perspective of disabled parents. We understand there are child safety concerns, which is an element of our work, but we see that the system in place about parenting capacity assessments means a disabled parent is starting off on the wrong foot when he or she comes to child protection issues through national services. The assessments do not recognise your abilities and there are assumptions about whether you should have become a parent. As well as the costs related to surrogacy, disabled people have to deal with additional costs of day-to-day living and that can impact on raising a child, which is not cheap.

There are different attitudes. There are simple things about when things are held. There have been examples of people being physically unable to attend meetings because there is not a lift and the meeting takes place upstairs. Notice for meetings where parenting will be assessed might be short. There might be an awful lot of materials, particularly in legal proceedings involving legalese and dense material. It is difficult to navigate a way around those systems. There is a lack of independent advocacy. A parent advocate independent of the legal advocate would go a long way to supporting parents through childcare proceedings, whether informal or at court level.