Disability is not asexuality: the childbearing experiences and aspirations of women with disability in Zimbabwe

Christine Peta turns a presumption often treated as common sense into the article’s central problem: disabled women are not inherently outside sexual and reproductive life. “Disability is not asexuality” does not argue against asexual identity. It challenges other people deciding in advance that disabled women have no desire, will not form intimate relationships and therefore do not need reproductive-health information. That presumption can enter clinical communication, service design and family relationships, making choices that should belong to women themselves difficult to see.

From a broader study of sexuality, Peta focuses on the childbearing experiences and aspirations of 16 disabled women aged 18–65 in Harare, Zimbabwe, using biographic narrative interpretive methods. The article explores what participants say about childbearing; it does not use a numerical sample to estimate the prevalence of an attitude across the country. Their accounts describe differing situations: some women wanted biological children, while relationships, health services and social expectations shaped what was possible. Holding these accounts together resists turning “disabled women” into a single, predetermined character.

The barriers described are not simply a question of whether a clinic exists. Inaccessible communication, a lack of usable sexual and reproductive-health information, and inadequate contraceptive counselling can all limit a woman’s ability to ask questions, understand care and give informed consent. At the same time, intimacy and fertility may be controlled by families or institutions in the name of protection. The article’s discussion of coerced sterilization makes the contradiction stark: society may treat disabled women as if they have no sexuality, yet also control their fertility without respecting their wishes. These apparently opposite attitudes both transfer decision-making away from the person concerned.

Reproductive justice here is therefore neither a call to encourage motherhood nor a view of “choice” detached from material conditions. Rights require accessible communication, reliable information and healthcare decisions grounded in consent and respect. They also require recognizing that a woman may want children, not want them, or hold any sexual identity. Equating disability with asexuality can exclude women from services; treating motherhood as the only path to liberation would prescribe another role for them.

The study uses a small, snowball-recruited sample in Harare and cannot represent all disabled women in Zimbabwe; the article also selects childbearing material from a wider study. Its contribution is not a national estimate but a close account of how power works through healthcare and intimate relationships. Read it with “Ten Principles of Disability Justice” and the Vietnam study of participatory film-making with disabled girls, then compare the Sri Lanka policy brief on collective rights advocacy. Together they approach movement principles, narrative authority, reproductive care and public advocacy as distinct but connected questions—not interchangeable experiences. The journal article gives the study’s methods and its limits.