Some initial thoughts on the disability discrimination section of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission Report. First, more work is needed to seek out & respect the views of disabled people themselves, and especially those who experienced these settings firsthand.

The report does not focus in depth on many settings in which disabled people were detained (e.g. psychiatric hospitals, residential disability institutions), so it’s clearly not a full picture of the human rights violations experienced by disabled people on this issue.

The report shows the flow of disabled people between mother and baby homes, psychiatric hospitals, county homes, Magdalene laundries & specialist disability services. This deserves more attention - who was responsible for admission/discharge decisions? What criteria did they use?

On the issue of consent of disabled mothers to place their children for adoption – the report shows that often, where disabled mothers made the ‘right’, socially acceptable choice; that is, to place the child for adoption, then they were often deemed to have capacity to decide.

When disabled mothers resisted the adoption of their children, and were perceived to be making the ‘wrong’ decision, many were found to lack capacity to decide. Critical analysis of the subjective, value-laden nature of these capacity assessments is missing from the report.