Parents' Forum

There’s a thought-provoking article by Minette Marrin in yesterday’s Sunday Times, here. Her basic point is that people with severe learning disabilities should not have children, because of the difficulties involved in raising them and the cost to the state of the necessary care.

I do have a small measure of sympathy for her frustration with the approach often taken by the disabled lobby, which creates this fantasy that disability is in everybody else’s minds and that disabled people have the ‘right’ to have children – I think this approach consistently whitewashes the practical difficulties confronting disabled people, which does not help them at all. But I am more disturbed by the logic of her argument, as follows:

‘There is a growing body of evidence (across the entire population) that children whose homes are talk-poor, whose parents can’t or don’t communicate with them well and who can’t make careful plans and boundaries for them or help them with schoolwork, are children brought up to serious distress and exclusion.

‘It is hard enough to be an adequate parent with supposedly normal intelligence. For someone of very low intelligence it is even harder.’

This seems to me to be Marrin’s own version of the argument that disability is just a version of ability, or ‘normality’ – and hints that the presumed welfare of the child should be used to counter the desire of parents who are not brainy / educated to have children. Personally, I think it’s rubbish that the best parents are the most intelligent ones. Where do we put the balance on this?