During the National Inquiry, women with disabilities told stories that highlight the
inability of service providers to provide disability-inclusive services, and the prevalence of
gender-and-disability insensitive and discriminatory treatment. In several instances,
reasonable accommodation was not observed among health facilities nor considered in
health services. There were also accounts that frontline service providers including health
service providers (HSPs), municipality/provincial/city social welfare officers, Philippine
National Police (PNP) and barangay Violence Against Women (VAW) desk officers lack
sensitivity to the needs and rights of women with disabilities.
For instance, a woman with disability from Cebu shared that persons with
disabilities face a multitude of challenges in accessing sexual and reproductive health
(SRH) services. These include not only long queues, distant health facilities, and unfriendly
physical structures; they also include high costs, negative attitudes of service providers,
and negative perceptions by able-bodied people that persons with disabilities should be
asexual.25 Another woman with disability from Cebu also shared that, “Service providers
are not trained to have the special skills needed to handle women with disabilities.” She
shared how health care providers get shocked when they receive pregnant women with
disabilities at health facilities. She stressed that, “Catering to persons with disabilities
requires particular skills, and at the moment we do not have them.”
Women with disabilities also reported the unavailability or absence of personnel
that provide assistance to mobility impaired and deaf or hearing impaired women with
disabilities in hospitals and health centers. The public hearing in NCR surfaced that
companions of women with disabilities who provide assistance for their mobility and
communication needs were not allowed in maternity wards and delivery rooms. These
narratives highlight the continuing gaps in health service providers’ ability to provide
disability-responsive and disability-inclusive services.
Due to limited understanding of disabilities, women with invisible disabilities such
as those with chronic illnesses and those with psychosocial, cognitive, and hearing
impairments are often denied “reasonable accommodation.”26 There are reports of
25
Woman with Mobility Impairment, Cebu Fact Finding Mission
26
It is the ‘necessary and appropriate modification and adjustments not imposing a
disproportionate or undue burden, where needed in a particular case, to ensure to persons with
disabilities the enjoyment or exercise on an equal basis with others of all human rights and
fundamental freedoms’ requiring that State parties guarantee to persons with disabilities equal
and effective legal protection against discrimination on all grounds. See ‘necessary and
appropriate modification and adjustments not imposing a disproportionate or undue burden,
where needed in a particular case, to ensure to persons with disabilities the enjoyment or
exercise on an equal basis with others of all human rights and fundamental freedoms’ requiring
that State parties guarantee to persons with disabilities equal and effective legal protection
against discrimination on all grounds. See UN CRPD. 02 September 2016. CRPD/C/GC/3.
12