As feminist researchers who have been working with women with intellectual disabilities, we found Adrienne Rich's quotation to be particularly poignant and ironic in relation to our recent work. Rich argues that a dominant traditional discourse in our societies has positioned women unquestioningly as mothers. Indeed she argues that ‘a woman's status as child bearer has been the test of her womanhood’ (Rich 1979b: 261). Women with disabilities have in the past been excluded from this societal expectation and their womanhood has been a problematic issue for those around them (Asch and Fine 1992; Johnson 1998a). This has been particularly the case for women with intellectual disabilities who were constituted by the eugenics movement early this century as a threat to the very structure of society because of their child bearing capacity (Brantlinger 1995; Rose 1979; Scheerenberger 1983).

Consequently, many women with intellectual disabilities were subject to sterilisation, constant surveillance and institutionalisation (Johnson 1998a; Potts and Fido 1991; Trent 1994) to prevent them from becoming mothers. For women with intellectual disabilities, then, the dominant discourse historically has situated them as women who are unfit to have children or to be mothers.