Disability: Parents with intellectual disabilities

by David McConnell

A gulf exists between the rights and the realities of parents with intellectual disabilities. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities affirms the right of persons with disabilities to marry and found a family. Moreover, in Article 23, states are bound to ¿take effective action and appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination¿¿ and ¿¿render appropriate assistance to persons with disabilities in the performance of their child-rearing responsibilities.¿ The brutal reality however is that parents with intellectual disabilities rarely receive appropriate assistance and many have their children taken from them by child protection authorities. This book examines decision-making in child protection and court systems. Applying the discourse ethics of the contemporary German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, the author finds that with respect to parents with intellectual disabilities and their children, the process is anything but just.

200 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2009

About the author

David McConnell has been writing and thinking about the written word his entire life. Self-taught, he created his own curriculum of ancient literature. His fictionalized memoir, The Firebrat, came out in 2003 and was nominated for a Violet Quill Award.
He is now working on a true crime non-fiction project entitled GAY PANIC: True Stories of Straight Men Who Kill Gay Men. He is also continuing a twenty-year project, an unfinished poem in an invented syllabic form, The Square.

McConnell was born in 1959 in Cleveland, Ohio, attended The Hawken School, Choate/Rosemary Hall, Shaker Heights High Schooland lasted a year at Columbia College in New York City.

While living in upstate New York, he published a literary magazine with Nora Wright, the poet Tory Dent and James Cheney.

Peripatetic for a while, McConnell lived in a white high rise overlooking Lake Erie, then sublet the painter Joe Brainard's Green Street loft in New York City, then moved to Hudson, New York, for a single year, then relocated to Paris, France, for five.

After returning to New York, he got a pilot's license and, for a short time, taught elementary math to prisoners on Riker's Island. He now lives with sometime Mississippi businessman Darrell Crawford in a West Chelsea townhouse where he has been the host of countless parties honoring his many literary friends and their works.

Read more about him at www.DavidMcConnell.com"