Pregnancy Is a Minefield When You're Disabled

“Are you sure you’re going to be able to do this?” a doctor asked Heather Watkins shortly after she gave birth to her daughter. Watkins, who has muscular dystrophy, had developed preeclampsia and had to be induced at 39 weeks—exhausted after 26 hours of labor, she didn’t give the remark much thought. Years later, a lightbulb went off in her head: some doctors don’t think disabled people ought to have kids.

Even among those who do, training is woefully deficient. Disabled people who become pregnant face a greater risk of complications—including far greater risks of death—at roughly equal rates across very different disabilities, a finding suggestive of underlying medical failures and biases.

Those biases, and that shortage of training, shape the care that health professionals and institutions provide to disabled pregnant people—which new medical training is slowly beginning to change.

“It doesn’t make sense to say, uniformly across all of these different disability types, that none of your bodies work,” National Institutes of Health staff scientist Jessica Gleason, who led a 2021 study that looked at adverse outcomes for disabled pregnant people, told me in December.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/07/pregnancy-disability-death-ob-gyn-training/

Reminds me of a time long ago when a young MD friend who was a neurology resident was all up in arms about a pregnant patient who was paraplegic and soon to deliver. All the docs were pretty weird about it. She did fine though she had to have a C-section. No complications.