Personal stories

Stories of people with disabilities

What’s it like to fall in love?
Do people with disabilities want to have sex?
Can they raise children?
Do they want to get married?
How did they experience someone harassing them?

Because we are interested in how people with disabilities live; what they think and experience, and because we like to listen and read about the experiences of others, we collected several stories of girls, women, and men with mental disabilities from the Czech Republic and from Iceland, in which they describe their experiences with friendship and love, with partner relationships and sexuality, as well as with pregnancy, parenthood, abortion, gynaecological ailments, and abuse.

In the autumn of 2015, we created a questionnaire for mothers of women with mental disabilities, which helped us map their experiences with gynaecological care and ascertain their needs in terms of access to information and services. Filling out the questionnaire became a springboard for us to gather the aforementioned stories of girls and women with mental disabilities. You can read the stories as well as details about the questionnaire in the individual sections.