Still in effect... If you\'re disabled, you\'re Not allowed to have kids.

While many can't understand why I had to be "fixed" in Canada and can't get married, perhaps the most chilling situation exists in China where a number of provinces ban marriages between people with developmental and other disabilities unless the parties have been sterilized.  In Gansu Province more than 150,000 people have been sterilized since 1988. Officials in Szechuan province stated: 'Couples who have physical/mental deficiency and/or deformity must not be allowed to bear children'.  Now 20 years later, when disabled women are found to be pregnant, they are subjected to forced abortions.  But despite widespread criticism of China's population policies, the attitude that disabled people should not have children is all too common in North America. Many disabled women and men found to be sexually active are subject to forced and coerced sterilizations - including hysterectomies/vasectomies performed without medical justification.    The attitude that we are and should be non-sexual seems to exist across a broad range of cultures. The Social Security Administration has the idea that disabled people are not to fall in love, get married, have sex or have a life of our own. Instead, we are to be kept in Institutions - whether traditional hospitals or euphemistically named 'homes' which forbid sexual contact for their residents. The US Library of Congress, a primary source of material for blind and other print-handicapped people, was instructed by Congress in 1985 to no longer make Playboy available in braille or on tape. Sadly, it's not just medical experts who are guilty of ignoring the reproductive and sexual rights and needs of people with disabilities. The abortion rights movement has crudely exploited fears about 'defective fetuses' as a reason to keep abortion legal. Zoe Washburn, in her poem, 'Hannah', grieves the child she wanted to have and the abortion she was coerced into.... '... so she went to the doctor, and let him suck Hannah out with a vacuum cleaner... The family stroked her hair when she cried and cried because her belly was empty and Hannah was not only dead, but never born. They looked at her strange crippled-up body and thought to themselves, thank God that's over.' The disability rights movement has certainly not put sexual rights at the forefront of its agenda. It's easier to talk about discrimination in employment, education, and housing than to talk about our exclusion from sexuality and reproduction.   When trying to stand up for our rights as individuals, all we get are counselors advising 'I know it is very hard to accept that you have lost your sexuality but you don't need to draw attention to it this way.'  In other words, they know it's not fair, but that's life!