This means the estimated 400,000 people with disabilities who are paid an average of $2.15 an hour will slowly gain access to jobs that pay the full minimum wage. That’s a big deal, especially to people like George, who used to work in a sheltered workshop run by Melwood, the company where Cari serves as president and CEO.

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George used to get nervous at work exactly twice a year. He’d held the same job providing cleaning services at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development since 2008, but since Melwood was a sheltered workshop, George could be paid less than the minimum wage. The only way for him to avoid that was to test well at time trials held every six months. If he completed his work quickly enough, he was paid at a fixed rate. If he was too slow, he’d be paid a subminimum wage.

Today, we recognize that type of testing as cruel. But Melwood was established in 1963 by families who wanted to provide their children with developmental disabilities with opportunities to gain skills, have a vocation, and earn a wage. At the time, this was considered progressive — many people with disabilities ended up warehoused in institutions, and these families simply wanted to be able to keep them at home. But as disability policy has evolved, disabled people have been able to demand more — including access to jobs that pay well enough that workers can support themselves. Society changed, and programs like Melwood had to change with it.

In 2016, Melwood got on board. It relinquished the 14(c) certificate that classified it as a sheltered workshop and transitioned to paying all of its employees with disabilities competitive wages in integrated settings.

There were supports in place to make it work: The University Centers on Disability, Parent Training and Information Centers, and Protection and Advocacy Network all provide supports and services to help people move to integrated employment. Oregon and other states have demonstrated the ability for disabled workers to achieve successful outcomes transitioning to competitive integrated employment when state Vocational Rehabilitation Agencies and Intellectual/Developmental Disability Services work together.

In 2019, people with disabilities should not be facing futures with segregation and subminimum wages. They should be allowed to reach their full potential in a competitive integrated environment. They should earn a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.

Correction: This piece was updated to remove one of the original authors.

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In 2001, three intellectually disabled D.C. residents brought suit against the city in Doe ex rel. Tarlow v. D.C, after they were subjected to at least three involuntary procedures: two abortions and one elective eye surgery. Ultimately, the district court agreed that these women’s due process rights had been violated and that “constitutionally adequate procedures” had not been followed. The District Court ruled for the plaintiffs and held that D.C.  must make “documented reasonable efforts to communicate” with patients and if unsuccessful, the government had to take into account the “totality of circumstances” before proceeding to ensure any decision is in the best interest of the patient. This decision codified patients’ right to self-determination, and struck down the practice of elective surgeries without consent from the patients at stake.

On appeal, Judge Kavanaugh vacated the District Court’s injunction, arguing that “accepting the wishes of patients who lack, and have always lacked the mental capacity to make medical decisions does not make logical sense.” That stands in contrast to even the most conservative interpretations of the laws that existed at the time, which required two separate health professionals to determine whether a patient had the capacity to make medical decisions before every procedure. The lifetime pass Kavanaugh seems to be arguing for, which would allow doctors to perform any procedures they wanted on a person who was once ruled unfit, does not exist.

One hundred years ago, Kavanaugh’s ruling would have been at home on the Supreme Court. In the 1920’s, in the famous 8-1 ruling of Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court found a Virginia statute that allowed for the sexual sterilization of a third generation, “feebleminded” women was constitutional because “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

For context, when the Supreme Court made that ruling, John Scopes had recently been put on trial for teaching evolution in public schools. Penicillin hadn’t been invented. It was still illegal in most states to marry someone of a different race. There was no such thing as a chocolate chip cookie, Scotch tape, or the Golden Gate Bridge. We didn’t know Pluto existed.

We’ve made progress since then. Twenty-eight years ago, the Americans with Disabilities Act granted people with disabilities access to society. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act expanded the right to an education 43 years ago, and the Olmstead v. L.C. decision gave disabled people the right to live in their communities 19 years ago. All that will be meaningless the moment Kavanaugh is given a seat on the Supreme Court that allows him to rule that disabled Americans are not capable of deciding what’s best for them. It’s not hard to imagine that happening. He could rule that it’s okay for teachers to use seclusion and restraint because they know what’s best for the treatment of disabled children in school. He could say that community living isn’t the best option for someone successfully living in a home of their own because that’s what the nursing home lobby says.

As both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate gear up for what is likely to be a long hearing process, the 57 million Americans with disabilities are bracing themselves for the negative consequences of Judge Kavanaugh’s appointment. If that happens, the disability community’s history of activism in all forms—from their work to preserve the ACA, to fighting to end the use of electric shock therapy on children, to pushing for a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work—shows that when it’s most needed, the moral arc of the universe can be bent into a ramp to achieve justice.

My husband and I sat in the ADA section towards the back of the main floor—I’m a little person, so the only thing I can see in general seating is other concert-goers butts. The show was extraordinary—it was visually stunning, and emotionally empowering. Towards the end of her set, The Electric Lady took a moment to talk about the dark times we are in and the interdependence of social justice movements. As she rattled them off—telling her fans that we “need to fight for black and brown communities, immigrants, the disability community…” —my jaw fell open. Never, in my (almost) 40 years on this planet, have I heard an artist specifically call out my community, let alone use our preferred language (too often we are called “special needs,” “differently abled,” or “handicapable”). There was a flurry of activity as everyone I was sitting with checked with their seatmate to make sure it had actually happened: That a mainstream artist, at a public event, had just included us in their activism.

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Monae was leaning into a shift that we’ve seen take place over the past year. Last month, Ava DuVernay pushed back when fans of Queen Sugar asked her to reverse a character’s Lupus. Many folks felt like having a disability made the character weak. But instead of caving to pressure and “healing” the character, DuVernay focused on how disability adds important complexities. She replied, “[r]espectfully, we can have physical illness and still be whole. That’s what this storyline explores among other things. Many of us live with chronic illness and still we thrive and live and love wholeheartedly.”

I want to be specific about the role black women are playing here. When a community member thanked Brittany Packnett, from Operation Zero and Teach for America, for highlighting the perspectives of the disability community in response to the straw ban and other acts of ableism, Packnett said that it’s “because we’re used to not being listened to.” That open acknowledgement of interdependence makes this feel like it’s part of a bigger movement—the intersectional kind that Monae called for.

Most years, this last week in July is the only time that the media turns its attention to people with disabilities. It’s the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), so there are usually a smattering of stories about the importance of including people with disabilities in American society. But this year has been different. The ongoing assault on health care has forced the media to grapple with its tendency to cast disabled people as either vulnerable victims or powerful protestors. We’ve seen a phenomenal series of stories by Joe Shapiro talking about sexual assault of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. We’re seeing on-going discussion of the trauma being experienced by the children at the border, which will follow them for a lifetime. We saw open discussions of mental health rise when Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade died. We got to watch W. Kamau Bell do a #UnitedShades segment with powerhouse Alice Wong, and Drunk History covered the 504 Sit-ins (the longest occupation of a federal building in U.S. History.)

So it feels appropriate that this is the week that the Center for American Progress (CAP) is launching the Disability Justice Initiative. CAP is the first D.C.-based national progressive organization to have a disability shop, and I am thrilled to build off of the work of folks like Eli Clare, Mia Mingus, and Sins Invalid, to work on cross-movement organizing and to center multiply-marginalized disabled people. The project is working to bring the disability lens across issues progressives are working on, and will also work to get progressives to the table as allies and accomplices fighting for the rights of people with disabilities.

We are setting a big table—a massive table. We’re including people with mobility, sensory, mental health, and learning disabilities, and calling in our siblings with chronic health conditions (like diabetes, migraines, fibromyalgia and IBS/IBD), eating disorders, folks in recovery from substance use, and people living with and learning how to navigate trauma.

There is not a single issue, whether it be health care, paid leave, immigration, climate change, education, or voting, that does not impact the 1 in 5 Americans that lives with a disability. Now that Americans are starting to recognize that—that we are a part of every community, that we are here to fight, and that we are worth fighting for—it is time to formalize our seat at the table. And we’re leaving another seat open for you.

I don’t remember the first time that I saw “ The Wizard of Oz”. I know there was a period of time before we owned it on VHS, because I remember what a big deal it was for my family the first time it went on sale. Both of my parents were also little. My mom ran a Disabled Students Center at a Community College and my dad served on the board of a Center for Independent Living, so disability issues were a constant topic of conversation around the dinner table (and in the car, and pretty much everywhere).  My mom and dad felt very strongly that it was important for me to grow up seeing positive images of people like us in the media, to offer an alternative to teasing and bullying that we were subjected to out in public. The film sat in a plastic vertical towers of about a dozen VHS tapes, along with those big plastic-encased Disney films, “Transformers,” “Jem and the Holograms,” “Willow,” and “Time Bandits.”  That was my library of cinematic masterpieces, designed to keep me away from my dad’s collection of Mel Brooks films.

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Growing up in a family of Little People (LPs), this was totally normal. Those films weren’t the “little people” movies, they were just movies in the typical rotation. But, for some folks with dwarfism who are the only people like them in their families, “The Wizard of Oz” was the first time that they had ever seen themselves anywhere. That was how my parents grew up. They were the only Little People in their families: my mom in California as number 5 of 8, my dad in Alabama as a twin in a family of four children (his sister is Average Height). As kids, they went decades without seeing their bodies reflected anywhere, except in a 1939 MGM film.

It is impossible to disconnect “The Wizard of Oz” from its legacy as it relates to the representation of people with disabilities, and specifically LPs in Hollywood. No film before or since has cast so many disabled actors—at least 124. It cemented a relationship between the dwarfism community and Hollywood. LPs as a community can complain about the lack of quality roles in the media—for every Tyrion Lannister there’s the third elf on the right in a home improvement ad during the Christmas season—but they cannot complain about the lack of roles writ large. It wasn’t until recently that we started seeing average height actors “made short” by computer-generated imagery, instead of hiring LP actors for films like “Tiptoes” or “Snow White and the Huntsman.”

That legacy is still complicated. The Munchkins are a fictional people, but far too often that word is used as a derogatory term to describe actual Little People. The characters are entirely white, objectified, and don’t get any development. But at least they existed. They had a community and a culture, onscreen and off, that was the first of its kind. Imagine showing up at MGM because of a casting call you heard about in some corner of small town America, and walking into a set in Los Angeles where there are hundreds of people at your eye level. Not having to ask people to reach things for you, not having to struggle to hear a conversation going on over your head, not having to explain why it was inappropriate to pat you on the head. Walking places with people who walk the same speed as you, talking to people who understand what it’s like to be teased, taunted, or abused for the very same difference that you have. It was such an intense experience that at the end of filming many of the LPs who played Munchkins decided to stay and settle in the Los Angeles area. In the time spent filming the movie, they met significant others onset and fell in love.  Many had families and stayed in Hollywood for work. It was the beginning of the development of a community of multi-generational LP families.

Several years later, actor Billy Barty, Texas Instruments engineer Lee Kitchens, Anna Dixon, and several other little people formed Little People of America. Jerry Maren was one of the first members. Because of the Wizard of Oz and the attention paid to the film, the formation of LPA became news, and Ed Sullivan had Billy Barty on his show to talk about the first annual conference. My maternal grandfather Jesse happened to see that episode, and for the first time he saw an adult with a similar condition to the smiling freckled red-headed daughter he had at home. It gave him a sense that her future would, in fact, be ok. That encouraged him to reach out to the local chapter and get my mom involved. A few years later, at a convention, met a rebellious boy from Alabama who drove a ‘69 Camaro all the way from Selma to San Francisco for a date. That was my dad.

Jerry was a regular attendee at the national conferences, and he always took time to greet the new families who were unsure of what their child’s life would be like. I remember how excited he was when I went to college; for most of his generation, our people didn’t go to college and many didn’t graduate high school. Those were the days before Section 504 or the ADA required physical accessibility of colleges and universities, and the public in general. School, and most everyday jobs, were physically inaccessible to Jerry’s generation. It would seem like light years until people actually started believing that people with disabilities could learn, could achieve, could love.

To adult LPs, Jerry and his wife were elders of our community. They were the folks you would point out to your kids when you saw them in the hotel restaurant. To kids they were heroes. To adolescents, they were a little something more complicated. When you’re plagued with feelings of not fitting in, and you find yourself fending off insults by both peers and members of the general public, it was easy to feel embarrassed by those that portrayed the Munchkins.

I will admit that snarky teenager still lives in me a bit. The last time I saw Jerry at a Little People Convention, I stood in line with my husband to get an autograph for our future children. I found myself wondering, aloud, what would be the most creative pick-up line you could use if you were the last living Munchkin. The list was long, and served to embarrass my husband for over an hour.

Now as an adult, and a parent myself, we’ve watched the film with our kids. My kids are still young, but I imagine that they’ll grow up with us having similar conversations about representation, about history, and about why things like “The Wizard of Oz” matter. And while it leaves us with longing for better, more well-developed work, its legacy laid the groundwork for that.

So thank you, Jerry. Thank you for the work you did to put our people in front of the camera, for taking the time to talk to so many scared families, for encouraging so many awestruck kids, for sharing so many stories, and for helping create a community at a time when so many of our people felt so alone. And for the other 123 of you changed history that day in October 1938, thank you for making it possible for me to be here now.

I sat down with Rebecca Cokley, a senior fellow for disability policy at the Center for American Progress, to discuss this.

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Rebecca Vallas: So I’ve had conversations with a lot of folks who say “Why does it matter? People can use all kinds of language but isn’t this just about people being a little too PC?”

Rebecca Cokley: I’m going to read a quote from Leslie Templeton from the Women’s March Disability Caucus. She just posted a series of snapshots of news clips talking about the mental status of Trump. She said, “When you read stuff like this, having said issue yourself, it makes you feel small. It makes you feel inferior, it makes you feel weak. Not only do I feel like my rights are being attacked by Trump, I feel who I am is being attacked by the American people.”

These are people’s lives. The accusation of someone’s unfitness to serve in any sort of role—whether as a parent, a colleague, a boss, an educator—is impacted by the slightest accusation, especially around mental health. It’s not about someone being PC or not, it’s really about a lack of understanding of the impact of labeling someone without irrefutable proof.

RV: So there’s a connection being made between his negative behaviors and his unpopular policies that people are explaining by this labeling. You’re saying that by extension people who themselves have mental health disabilities, mental illness, intellectual disabilities, and so forth are being implicated in these negative behaviors.

RC: Definitely. I also think one of the challenges with all these armchair diagnostics is that the people that are doing it aren’t even clear on what a mental health disability is. We sit there and see articles titled like, “Can someone with the attention of a kitten on crack make a decision?”, “Trump has social autism,” “Trump has a dangerous disability.” People still like to think about the other, the unknown, the shadow in the corner of the room, the thing we don’t talk about, versus acknowledging that it’s your son seeking therapy, it’s your best friend who is grieving the loss of their mother, it’s your boss who is now taking anti-anxiety meds. It’s much easier to castigate those folks than to say, “No, these are real people, and in some cases even me.”

RV: There’s a particular significance of this conversation having to do with the presidency or really with any elected office. It’s basically gospel that people with mental illness or mental health disabilities are unfit to serve. If someone has ever sought treatment—whether for depression or for substance misuse—even just that can stop someone from being taken seriously as a potential candidate. So in reinforcing this kind of narrative around what mental illness is and tacking it onto Trump’s face, there is a much deeper consequence that a lot of people aren’t thinking about that has to do with maintaining the status quo or even taking us backwards in terms of representation by people with disabilities in elected office.

RC: Definitely. When we’re talking about people with disabilities writ large we’re talking about 54 to 58 million people. If you’re zooming in specifically on people with mental health disabilities or mental illness, we’re talking about 10 million people in this country. And I think as we’re talking about Trump, it really is much easier to point at “mental fitness” than to actively talk about behaviors. That’s uncomfortable, because it forces us to be specific: What are the behaviors that we’ve seen? What are the behaviors that are evident in this person’s history that we should be pointing at to say “we screwed up here.” We dropped the ball, we elected somebody who was unfit to become president of the United States.

Besides, we have a history in this country of electing people with disabilities. Right now we can look at Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) and Rep. Jim Langevin (D-RI) as people with physical disabilities that are currently serving in government.

RV: Your examples point out that people would not be looking at Trump and saying “man, his disability makes him unfit to serve” if it were a physical disability—that’s something that people at their core would understand would be deeply offensive. But if it’s a mental illness, all of a sudden that seems to be equivalent to unfitness to serve.

That brings us to something you often talk about, what you refer to as “a hierarchy of disability.” And what this means in the policy context, for example, is that it has been a lot easier to get health coverage if you’re a person who has a physical illness or a physical disability than it is to get mental health coverage. But that conversation is rare when it’s about social perceptions and stigma. I think what we’re seeing here is this massive gap between the trust that a lot of people in this country have for the potential leadership or decision-making by people without disabilities or people with physical disabilities, compared with people who have mental health disabilities or mental illness or intellectual disabilities and so forth. Am I right to characterize it that way?

RC: I think you’re definitely right. I’ll even use myself as an example, being a little person. I walk in the room and you can tell that I’m a little person. Nobody is going to object to me asking for a stool or jumping on the chair to push the chair down. But for a long time I wasn’t as out about having obsessive compulsive disorder and it wasn’t something I frequently talked about until I was in my 20s. I was actually challenged by a friend and mentor of mine, Andy Imparato, who is very outspoken about having a mental health disability. When Andy and I were on a four-hour car ride from Washington, D.C. to Newport News for the Virginia Youth Leadership Forum, there were two topics of conversation: One, why haven’t I proposed to my then-boyfriend, now husband and two, why don’t I talk about having OCD?

We had a conversation about why I was hesitant to talk about it, and why I had put myself out as an advocate, as a spokesperson, as somebody working in the disability space, but I was not coming to the table with my whole self there. And so I tried it that night. I addressed the fact that I walk in the room as a little person and that’s a privilege. And I often don’t think we talk about disability as privilege. There is a privilege to my existence as a person with a physical disability. There’s a privilege to the fact that unlike 80% of disabled people, I grew up in a family just like me.

And then I addressed the fact that I also have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and I used to wash my hands like 200 times a day. The number of young women who came up to me afterward was amazing. It was about 50 young women that pulled me aside that all wanted to talk about mental health disabilities. The fact that I had a job, the fact that I was in a relationship, the fact that I was being paid to go around the country and talk to other young people with disabilities, and the fact that I was working on a presidential campaign at the time were huge.

So I think a lot of times when we have internally stigmatized our own mental health disabilities and then we face a public that criminalizes mental health, without any criminal behaviors associated with it. We do it for no more reason other than to say that you don’t like somebody, for no more reason than to say that somebody is evil or you don’t agree with their decisions. It invalidates a part of their humanity, and makes it that much harder for folks to come out.

RV: I want to get to the solutions part—how we do better. You talked about the importance of precision in language. What’s your advice to those folks who are out there wanting to be good allies on this?

RC: I think checking in on your friends that have mental health disabilities and saying, “Hey, how is it going? Do you need anything? How are you feeling in this time?” And doing some real deep listening as to what people are encountering, because it’s hard right now. I think also connecting to organizations that work with folks with mental health disabilities, whether it be groups like Dan Fisher’s Psych Survivors Network or certain chapters of the National Alliance on Mental Illness that are doing some really good things. Engage to see what needs to be said, what is the right language to use, and ask your friends. So much of our language gets caught up on the fear of saying the wrong thing versus taking five seconds and asking your friends what’s the right thing to say.

I also think, as long as we continue to hold mental health at arms length as “the other,” we can’t have the conversation that we really need to be having. That leads to the criminalization of mental health and the knee-jerk reaction of saying, “Oh, that person can’t do that job because they’re nuts.”

RV: I want to read a tweet by Julia Bascom, Executive Director of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. She says, “We can conclude that the president is unfit to serve without armchair diagnosis or violations of medical ethics. We can resist racism, totalitarianism, and a nuclear threat without ableism. We don’t need this, we can do better, progressives have a moral obligation to do better.” Powerful words. But it feels to me that that piece of call-to-action language doesn’t quite go as far as some people are wanting to go, especially given the conversations about invoking the 25th Amendment. So I would love to hear any suggestions you have about how people can handle these kinds of hard and honest conversations when folks are looking for guidance about how they can actually engage in this conversation but in a way that is not ableist.

RC: I think going back to the last line of Julia’s tweet, progressives have a moral obligation to do better. We are the party that came up with mental health parity in health care, thanks to former Senator Paul Wellstone. We are the party that is pushing for the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. We are the party that is pushing to end sub-minimum wage programs for people with disabilities. We are the party that is pushing to increase access to mental health services on college campuses and programs for young people with mental health disabilities. Why are we then at the same time being so quick to use disability diagnosis as a weapon? Because we don’t like the president and we think the president is acting like a jackass. If President Obama wasn’t afraid to say Kanye was a jackass, why can’t we say that President Trump is being a jackass?

This interview was conducted for Off-Kilter and aired as part of a complete episode on January 6. It was edited for length and clarity.

Here’s the question the disability community and the next generation now face: We got the ADA 25 years ago, so what’s next? The answer you get depends greatly on whom you ask. My answer is likely a bit untraditional: we must protect the civil rights of parents with disabilities.

In 2012, the National Council on Disability released “Rocking the Cradle: Protecting the Civil Rights of Parents with Disabilities.”  The report examined the disparate treatment of parents with disabilities in matters of child custody, foster care, adoption, and family law. Right now in 37 states parents with disabilities can have their custodial rights terminated on the basis of having a disability. Additional rights to be an adoptive or foster parent, to have access to reproductive technology, and to be treated fairly in the eyes of the child welfare and family court system are also impacted by discrimination on the basis of a parent’s disability.

“She’s blind, how will she ever read a thermometer to see if her child has a temperature?” “He uses a wheelchair, how will he ever play baseball with his son?” Statements such as these are actual reasons that children have been stripped away from loving homes, according to the testimonies of Carrie Ann Lucas and Kelly Buckland at last week’s quarterly meeting of the National Council on Disability. Lucas is one of only four attorneys in the nation who work on these kinds of cases, and Buckland—the Executive Director of the National Council on Independent Living—wrote the first laws to protect civil rights of parents with disabilities in Idaho.

The bias against parents with disabilities is well embedded in the history of the United States. During the first half of the 20th century, the eugenics movement led to more than 30 states passing legislation that permitted the involuntary sterilization of people with disabilities. This legislative trend was based on the belief that people with disabilities and other “socially inadequate” populations would produce offspring who would be a burden on society. The Supreme Court subsequently endorsed this policy, and by 1970 more than 65,000 Americans had been involuntarily sterilized. Even today, 25 years after the passage of the ADA, several states still have some form of involuntary sterilization law on their books.

Parents with disabilities are the only distinct community of Americans who must struggle to retain custody of their children. As we found in Rocking the Cradle, removal rates when parents have a psychiatric disability have been found to be as high as 70 to 80 percent; when the parent has an intellectual disability, 40 to 80 percent. In families in which the parental disability is physical, 13 percent have reported discriminatory treatment in custody cases. Parents who are deaf or blind report extremely high rates of child removal and loss of parental rights. Parents with disabilities are more likely to lose custody of their children after divorce, have more difficulty accessing reproductive health care, and face significant barriers to adopting children.

Parents with disabilities and their children are disproportionately—and often inappropriately— referred to child welfare services. Once involved in the child welfare system, these families are permanently separated at disproportionately high rates for a number of reasons, including: inclusion of disability as grounds for termination of parental rights (TPR) in many state statutes; the disparate impact of certain provisions of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (ASFA); perceived limits on the application of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), especially at the termination phase; bias, speculation, and the “unfit parent” standard; and a lack of training in relevant systems regarding parents with disabilities.

People with disabilities also face significant barriers, and even outright discrimination, that can prevent them from accessing reproductive technology that can enable a person to become a parent, such as assisted reproductive technology (ART). ART providers regularly discriminate against people with disabilities. Additionally, the growing costs of ART, combined with the limited insurance coverage for these treatments, leave many people with disabilities unable to afford the treatment. Half of all women with disabilities are covered by Medicaid and existing federal law allows states to refuse coverage for fertility drugs (but not Viagra.) These discriminatory policies and practices impact all demographics in the disability community including disabled service men and women. For example, in May of this year the Washington Post reported on Holly and Alex Dillmann who were denied access to in vitro fertilization (IVF) via their Veterans Affairs health plan, which up until this year banned the procedure. Their case is just the tip of the iceberg.

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Recent guidance from the Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services reiterating these agencies’ legal obligations pursuant to the ADA is an extremely positive development. However, further action is needed at the federal, state, and local levels to give parents with disabilities a level playing field:

• Congress, the Administration, and federal agencies should fund research on parents with disabilities and their families.
• States should eliminate disability from their statutes as grounds for termination of parental rights and enact legislation that ensures the rights of parents with disabilities.
• Congress should address the disparate treatment experienced by parents with disabilities by adding specific protections in the Adoption and Safe Families Act.
• Congress should shift funding priorities at the federal level so that states have a greater incentive to provide services to families while the children are maintained in the home, as research has shown that in-home services are most effective, particularly for people with disabilities.
• HHS and DOJ should collect annual data on parents with disabilities and their interaction with child welfare agencies and dependency courts; and DOJ should include such matters in its enforcement priorities and consider violations of parental rights to be violations of civil rights.
• The HHS Children’s Bureau should collaborate with the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR) in funding and directing the Institute’s National Center for Parents with Disabilities and Their Families.

Despite a dark history marked by the eugenics movement, increasing numbers of people with disabilities are choosing to become parents. My husband and I knew there was a 50% chance that our children would have dwarfism, and that made the idea of parenthood even more attractive, as we perceive dwarfism as part of our family’s culture. The right to parent without interference is protected by the U.S. Constitution. A child should only be taken from a custodial parent when the disability creates a situation that cannot be alleviated or accommodated.

I dream of a day when removal of a child from a parent with a disability is a rarity, so that in another 25 years the 4 million-plus parents with disabilities will be celebrating the ADA’s 50^th Anniversary as grandparents.