Second Manifesto on Disabled Women’s Rights

Protection can offer safety or become a justification for taking decisions away. The European Disability Forum’s 2nd Manifesto on the Rights of Women and Girls with Disabilities in the European Union places that contradiction at the intersection of feminist and disability politics. Proposed by the EDF Women’s Committee, it was adopted at the Budapest General Assembly on May 28–29, 2011, and endorsed by the European Women’s Lobby. This toolkit asks disability policy to address gender and gender policy to address disability, rather than leave disabled women at the margins of both movements.

Sections 5.2–5.4 make legal capacity concrete: women should decide about relationships, reproduction, property and financial affairs, with support to exercise that capacity. Needing support does not give family members, experts or providers automatic authority. How information is communicated, who assists and how that assistance can be challenged are conditions of rights. Describing someone as needing help is different from demonstrating that she has no wishes.

Community life is more than a different address

Section 7 calls for deinstitutionalization, affordable and acceptable community support, personal assistance and choice over where and with whom to live. Independent living here cannot mean doing everything alone; it concerns retaining control while receiving assistance. Sections 7.7–7.8 therefore require independent oversight and disabled women’s participation through representative organizations in advising and assessing services. A service’s existence does not establish respect for its users.

The sexual and reproductive rights chapter extends agency into areas closed off in the name of protection. Sections 8.2–8.4 challenge the treatment of disabled women as asexual and recognize pleasure, information and sexuality without coercion. Sections 8.7–8.8 connect families’ fears about pregnancy and care with control over privacy and reproduction, opposing forced sterilization and coerced abortion. Safety cannot be the only account of sexuality: choosing relationships, obtaining knowledge and refusing interference also matter.

Motherhood should likewise not become a test requiring women to prove that they need no support. Section 5.11 opposes separation from children on grounds of disability, while sections 8.14–8.18 discuss parenting support, services and leave. Read beside community living, these provisions show that capacity is not an isolated bodily measure. Accessible environments, available services and recognition of a mother’s decisions shape what becomes possible. Receiving assistance should not become evidence against her right to decide.

Unresolved boundaries within the manifesto

The historical text also contains a tension. While opposing treatment against women’s wishes, sections 8.9–8.10 retain language about inability to consent, judicial approval and consent by parents or representatives. Respect for a woman’s will sits beside room for substitute consent. The manifesto’s overall commitment to rights cannot erase that friction with section 5’s support for personal decisions. It prompts questions about who determines inability to consent, whether communication support has been sufficient and who can challenge that judgment. These older clauses should not be treated as current medical or legal instructions.

Section 14 turns power back toward movements, demanding disabled women’s political participation within both women’s and disability organizations and support for organizations they lead. Carers and mothers can offer significant experience without automatically speaking for every disabled woman. Who sets the agenda, governs organizations, allocates resources and receives speaking time determines whether agency also exists within advocacy itself.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice brings interdependence and community support into everyday practice, offering a comparison with personal assistance and control. Helen Meekosha’s work on decolonising disability challenges treating European policy instruments as a universal account of global conditions. Both connections retain a demand: support should enlarge a person’s choices rather than take over her life in the name of help.