Denver — CARRIE Ann Lucas is confined to a wheelchair. She breathes with the aid of a ventilator. She cannot hear and can see only at close range.
She begins most days about 4 a.m. with newspapers and e-mails. About 5:30, she wakes her three disabled daughters. She and an aide dress the two who use wheelchairs. The girls cannot feed themselves, so Lucas and the aide plug feeding tubes into their bellies. She pours cereal for the one daughter who can eat on her own. She puts the girls on their school buses, the last leaving by 7:10.
Lucas cherishes these mornings, tough as they are, because she knows how hard it is to keep a family together.
She is one of a handful of attorneys in the country whose specialty is representing disabled parents like herself. Her mission: making sure they get the same chance as everyone else to be moms and dads.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 15% of all parents with children in the household have some disability. These parents are far more likely to have the government try to take their children away. Even Lucas lives in fear that social services may seize her children. She knows the sorrow of losing a child -- a 7-year-old girl whom she wanted to adopt was taken from her after a difficult court fight.
"I love my kids so much and I love being a parent so much, and I know my [clients] do too," said Lucas, 35, a wisecracking woman who once wrote an essay titled "one of the many joys of crip parenting."
"My clients have fought and fought and fought" to raise their children, she said. Her brassy voice wobbled as her eyes watered behind her tinted glasses. "It's just discrimination."
Lucas works her cases out of a seventh-floor office at the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition in central Denver. The walls are papered with magazine articles about disabled parents. A bumper sticker in the shape of a shark that reads "Lawyer" is prominently displayed. More disabled people seek help from the coalition than Lucas, who carries about a dozen cases at a time, can handle.
Among those she has worked with was a deaf woman in suburban Denver, whose two toddlers were taken away and put up for adoption after social workers deemed her an unfit mother because she could not hear her children's cries for attention. Lucas could identify with her -- she sleeps with a sound-activated pager that vibrates when one of her daughters calls for her.
