The impact of disability on motherhood decisions: New evidence from Spain

Abstract

There exists a high proportion of women with disabilities who decide to be mothers although there is a high stigma about their capabilities. The objective is to analyze the impact of disability, among other socioeconomic conditions, on the motherhood decisions. We compared the results of treating disability as exogenous with a bivariate probit model. A cross-sectional analytical study has been analyzed by using data from the Fecundity Survey of 2018. The model estimates the probability of having children having disability, which is a 3.5%. Moreover, motherhood propensity for disabled women is 0.4 percentage points lower than for non-disabled. In this article the authors undertook a significant literature review, then it is included a development of the theoretical and methodology framework for analyzing the effect of disability on the attitudes of women toward the decision of having children. In this context, many disabled women have successfully become mothers but the existent barriers have unmotivated others. The difficulty is basically due to the stigma about their mothering capabilities or associated with physical conditions such as risk of abortion or even a worsening of health. The economic framework under our specification is an extension of the Households Health Production Model where women derive utility from having children and they use their skills, knowledge or time to achieve their objective. In this case, to have children is the outcome and education, health status and other socioeconomic factors are the inputs. Having children is only one of the sources of utility that a woman has, they also derive utility from labor time, consumption or healthcare, among others. Despite several studies used this methodology to analyze motherhood decisions in many Countries in the world, the impact of disability is much less explored.