Master
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Minority status has a disproportionately negative impact on women with disabilities. A focus group study of women with physical disabilities from South Asia, Jamaica and Canada examined the impact of ethnicity and culture on sexuality.
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- A combination of culture and disability constrained them in learning about sexuality, relationship issues, and family planning issues
- Having a disability compounded their cultural mores that discouraged open discussion of sexuality
- While growing up, girls with disabilities were treated differently from their able-bodied sisters because families did not expect them to need intimate and marital relationships
- Parents who arranged marriages for their able-bodied daughters did not do so for their disabled daughters
- Asian men with and without disabilities rejected disabled women as partners
- Women from diverse cultures had the same experiences as white women in upholding stereotypes of women with disabilities as asexual and unable to assume marital or parenting roles
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Health professionals from these ethnic communities reacted negatively to disabled women becoming pregnant, from telling a woman with multiple sclerosis to have a tubal ligation to insisting that a woman with a disability abort her disabled fetus.
