How will I cope with a 'normal' baby?
She was born with a rare disability which her son Archie inherited. Now Emma Bowler is about to give birth to a child without the condition ...
EB
11 Dec 2006
She was born with a rare disability which her son Archie inherited. Now Emma Bowler is about to give birth to a child without the condition ...
New legislation introduced on 4 December 2006 means that disabled people have, for the first time, the right to be treated fairly and the right for reasonable adjustments, on buses, coaches, trains and taxis. The new law will also apply to car hire and breakdown services.
1. The starting point is an agreed definition of disability - this is what the Disability Discrimination Act uses "A person has a disability for the purposes of the DDA if s/he has a physical or mental impairment which has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on his or her ability to carry out normal day to day activities."
When it comes to disability, teachers are still not equal.
Two requests for deletions from the online archive led to some head scratching recently. The first came from a journalist who, several years ago, wrote about her young son's attitude to clothing. The article caused no bother until her son - by now computer literate - discovered it on the web. He was upset and embarrassed, and was being teased about it. The second request was from the parents of a child who was born with severe disabilities. Our article followed an interview they gave to a Sunday newspaper about the home birth that they had arranged. When they gave that interview they were thinking only about the print publication. It didn't occur to them that the online version might be picked up by other websites, and they didn't anticipate that cyber-bullies would send emails blaming them for their son's condition. They were finding it difficult to cope, and we deleted the article for compassionate reasons.
There can be few more emotive questions than the appropriate protective powers of the state over mentally ill people. Cases like that of Michael Stone - who, 11 years ago, bludgeoned to death Lin Russell and her daughter Megan - arouse deep-seated and understandable fears about dangerous men being allowed out on the loose. But set against such cases are stories like that of Randle McMurphy, who in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was destroyed at the hands of a mental institution. It is a fictional tale, but one which too often finds echoes in real-life reporting, which time and again has exposed how ruinous the behaviour of the over-stretched authorities can become once they are freed of the need to be led by the wishes of the patient.