People with disabilities who wish to have children are equally or more likely than the non-disabled population to experience infertility, yet disabled individuals are much less likely to have access to fertility treatment such as IVF. There are many extraneous factors that hinder disabled individuals access to IVF, such as assumptions about decision-making capacity, sexual interests and abilities, heritability of a disability, and beliefs about parenting ability. These same misconceptions about people with disabilities that once led health care providers to sterilise thousands of women with disabilities now lead them to provide or deny reproductive care on the basis of stereotypes concerning people with disabilities and their sexuality.
Not only do misconceptions about disabled individuals parenting ability, sexuality, and health restrict and hinder access to fertility treatment such as IVF, structural barriers such as providers uneducated in disability healthcare and inaccessible clinics severely hinder disabled individuals access to receiving IVF.