Newborns of women with disabilities overrepresented in children’s services

Toronto, ON, July 4, 2024 – A new study has found newborns of mothers with disabilities were more likely to be discharged into social services care immediately following their birth.

Researchers from ICES, the University College London, and the University of Toronto Scarborough have reviewed health records of over 1.4 million mothers and babies in Ontario to investigate the involvement of children’s social services at birth.

“Women with disabilities often face more discriminatory practices and assumptions about their capabilities as new mothers,” says lead author Claire Grant, a PhD candidate in the department of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London. “We wanted to explore the rates of social service discharge following birth among women with different types of disabilities, and to determine how long mothers and babies are separated.”

Published in the International Journal of Population Data Science, researchers examined health and social data from all singleton livebirths between 2008 and 2019 in Ontario, Canada. There were over 1.2 million births to women without disabilities, and 163,122 births to women with physical, sensory, intellectual/developmental, and multiple disabilities.

Key Findings include:

• Compared to newborns of women without disabilities (0.2%), newborns of women with physical (0.5%), sensory (0.4%), intellectual/developmental (5.6%), and multiple disabilities (1.7%) had an increased risk of being discharged to social services after the birth.
• Rates in newborns of women with intellectual/developmental and multiple disabilities were more than five times higher than for women with other types of disabilities.
• Across all groups, the strongest predictors of newborn discharge to social services were young age, experiences of poverty, mental illness or substance use disorders, inadequate prenatal care, and newborns complications.
• Newborns of mothers with disabilities also had an increased risk of separation that was sustained at 12 months of age.

Although data were available on a range of sociodemographic variables, the researchers note that they were unable to measure race or ethnicity (as a proxy for experiences of racism), as those variables were not recorded in the data.

Lack of supports available

In an ICES report released in May, it was found that women with all types of disabilities frequently reported experiencing judgement and discrimination from their health care provider during pregnancy and faced barriers accessing supports that could help them following the birth.

“Discharging newborns to social services at a young age can have a significant impact on mother-baby bonding and breastfeeding,” says Grant. “It’s also concerning to see the higher risk for sustained separation, which may further disrupt the parent-child relationship.”

The compelling findings underscore the critical role of meaningful, tailored supports for mothers with disabilities, both within the home and the community.

“Many of the challenges faced by women with disabilities could be supported through better parenting supports and social policies that address broader structural issues such as poverty,” says senior author Hilary Brown, Adjunct Scientist at ICES and Associate Professor in the Department of Health and Society at the University of Toronto Scarborough. “Mothers with disabilities were most at risk of having their newborn discharged into care if they were young, living in poverty, received inadequate antenatal care, or had a mental illness or substance use disorder. These issues need to be addressed as part of wraparound services.”

Such efforts require health and social service providers with good knowledge of disability, underscoring the ongoing need for better provider education and training.

The article, “Maternal disability and newborn discharge to social services: a population-based study,” was published in the International Journal of Population Data Science.

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Misty Pratt
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