Ms Louise Milicevic:

I want to touch on Senator Flynn's last point. In terms of the maternity services for disabled women, it very much depends. I am touching on what Ms Burns said as well. One can meet wonderful individuals within the maternity services who will go above and beyond. That was an experience that I had in my first pregnancy, where we had a wonderful physiotherapist who, on her own admission, did not really know how to work with myself and my husband, because we are both disabled, in terms of developing strategies but was willing to work with us so that by the time my daughter was born, we had developed techniques to be able to lift and change, etc.

My experience of maternity services in general was that from the moment you present yourself as a disabled pregnant woman, there is an automatic assumption of incapacity, that you will not be able to manage no matter how much you assure them that you can, and that if you cannot, that you will find the necessary supports. They cannot seem to get pass the fact that you have a physical disability and maybe the use of one limb, you are a wheelchair user, or you are deaf or whatever the case may be. You are starting from the back foot from the get-go and you spend most of your pregnancy nearly trying to convince the maternity service that you will be able to cope. Ironically, what happens then, certainly, with my subsequent pregnancies, is you learn to become a little bit more selective in the information you give because you know that if you are open and honest about the level of support you may need, you will face that attitude of you both being disabled, how you will not be able to manage and how you will need to have full support. Education is key for people who work within maternity services around disability but there is also a need to look at strategies, such as the national maternity strategy. The structures need to change to enable people who provide services and professionals in this area to support parents with disabilities as much as they can.