Professor Eilion?ir Flynn:

I completely support the points made by Nem and they are very valid. I want to touch on some of the other topics about which there were questions. With regard to legal or legislative barriers to disabled people adopting or fostering, in our view we did not come across any strictly formal legislative barrier in our research on reproductive justice and disability in Ireland. However, in the oral histories that we did with disabled people themselves we did not meet anyone who had successfully adopted. We did meet a number of people who had fostered, including some deaf parents who had fostered deaf children. This was a great placement because the children they were fostering came from an environment where Irish Sign Language was not being used. This was an opportunity for them to live not only in a family setting but with a family that had as its primary language those children's first language also. This was positive to see.

We also met a gay disabled man who had fostered and had experiences of being asked a lot of what he felt were very intrusive questions by social workers during the process to be approved to foster. This included being asked questions about what he would do if the children ran away and he had to chase them in his wheelchair. He was asked how this would work. These are not questions we ask non-disabled prospective foster parents. Assumptions are made that a disability would be a barrier to fostering boys who are very sporty. This is a misunderstanding of the value of disabled people as prospective foster and adoptive parents.

We agree there is a need for parents and children to remain together. If disabled parents need support in their parenting, it should be provided to them in their own homes, their own environment and their own social safety net. We have concerns coming from the many people in our research who had experience of being placed in a parent and child residential placement or an assessment unit. Most of the parents we spoke to who had been in these settings ended up having their children removed from their care subsequently. They definitely felt surveilled in these settings. Given everything that we know and understand now about the experiences in mother and baby homes, I suggest we need to be very careful about how we support disabled parents to ensure we do not re-enter an era of removing people from their natural home environments in supporting their parenting.

Deputy Ellis asked about forced sterilisation. This is something that we did not find any recent evidence of in our research but there were certainly people who were encouraged to be on long-term contraception who, perhaps, did not have adequate access to information about the type of contraception they were taking and what exactly it was for. They really did not feel they had much of a choice in the matter. We certainly had staff members working in various branches of health and social care tell us about historical experiences they had working in services where people were covertly administered what one staff member described as the pill in the porridge. We hope these practices are not ongoing today. We did not have recent examples in the research we conducted but that does not mean these things do not happen in family homes or in other settings.

Deputy Ellis asked about the obstacles to abortion access and reproductive healthcare in general. The obstacles that have been documented for all pregnant people acutely apply to disabled people. The three-day wait is significant, particularly if someone is living in residential care and may not have support from that service, depending on its religious ethos, to access abortion or other kinds of reproductive healthcare. Being able to leave twice and attend two appointments three days apart to access the service could be a real barrier for many people.

Some of the issues have been addressed. We know that since the beginning of the roll-out of abortion access the My Options service has had a phone number to call which is not accessible for members of the deaf community. A webchat function is now up and running. It works well but the problem is that information about individual providers is not available through the webchat function. This is creating a hierarchy of access and who gets what type of information. It is something we would like to see addressed in a different way than how it is being done at present.

This is the tip of the iceberg of some of the issues that people described to us in the research we conducted, to address some of the questions Deputy Ellis has asked. I am happy to follow up and provide more detailed information on any of the points.