Accessing Abilities While Parenting With a Disability: A Review of Jessica Slice’s Unfit Parent

Unfit Parent: A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World

by Jessica Slice

Beacon Press, 2025; 216 pp; $28.95

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In Unfit Parent: A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World, Jessica Slice, a writer and disability advocate from Toronto with an MA in social work, takes an unflinching look at how and why parents with disabilities are more likely to be seen as unfit simply because they have a disability. 

The statistics she gathers from disability studies are sobering. In the United States, parents with disabilities are 36 percent more likely than nondisabled parents to have cases brought against them by Child Protective Services or to be separated from their children. It is legal in 22 states to remove a child because a parent is disabled. In 35 states, having a disability can lead to the termination of parental rights.

Unfit Parent skillfully interweaves Slice’s own story of parenting with a disability through interviews, social commentary, disability theory, and sociohistorical evidence-based research. She speaks with parents with a range of disabilities, including those who are in wheelchairs or scooters, are blind, deaf, or neurodivergent, or have chronic health conditions, as well as nondisabled parents. 

A mother of two children,* Slice was diagnosed with Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS) and severe Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome when she was 28. Due to POTS, Slice’s body is unable to regulate her heart rate, blood pressure, digestion, or temperature. Ehlers-Danlos makes her bones prone to dislocation during something as minor as a bumpy car ride. Because of her conditions, Slice spends much of her time in a wheelchair. Though she sometimes feels anxious that she can’t participate in her children’s lives—for example, she never saw the inside of the school where her daughter went for two years because it did not have a ramp—she knows that her parenting matters: “I make this family better. Even though I must remind myself of that often.”

That she is a wonderfully resourceful and loving mother is abundantly clear to the reader. She shares stories of several clever inventions that enabled her to parent more easily. Instead of using a high chair, she fed her daughter in a booster-style seat on the ground. Instead of using a changing table, she carried a small mobile pad around the house. She cooked in a padded swivel chair in the kitchen and placed a cushioned bench by the front door so she could sit and hug her daughter goodbye before school and when she came home. 

When she speaks about her daughter, it is with pure adoration. Her description of meeting her for the first time is particularly moving. Five years after she was diagnosed with her conditions, Slice and her husband became certified to foster children. They had anticipated that an older child would be placed in their home. “We had been told that because so many people want only to foster newborns, it was unlikely that we would receive a call about one.” So, Slice was startled when her phone rang one morning in March, and she was told that a newborn in NICU needed a place to stay. She dropped everything and headed to the hospital. She writes that, as soon as she saw the baby, “impossibly, I loved her.”

It was all so sudden that she and her husband didn’t have any of the things they needed to care for a new baby. No diapers, wipes, bottles, clothes, or stroller. When they got home, Slice googled: “How do you take care of a newborn?” Then she wrote a post on her neighborhood email list saying she was unexpectedly taking care of a baby and, within minutes, neighbors began showing up with clothes, toys, blankets, and diapers. A doula introduced herself and offered a reduced fee. Shortly after, she came over and helped Slice set up a bottle sanitizing station, taught her how to swaddle her daughter, and offered to stay that night. And so, “a woman who had been a stranger the day before left to prepare to stay up all night with a baby who, a day earlier, we didn’t know existed.”

Slice’s first few weeks with her daughter were blissful. She felt profoundly peaceful and connected to her as if “every sound and wiggle and scrunch of her face was a language, and I was fluent.” Then she joined a group of new moms. At her first meeting, the other women talked about the first few weeks as though it were torture. Many said it was the hardest time of their lives. At first, Slice thought maybe their experience was so difficult because, unlike her, they had given birth. 

But as she listened, she realized what they most struggled with was the gap between what they’d hoped parenting would be and the reality of how it was actually playing out. It was then, she writes, that “I began to acknowledge that my experience of the first week of caring for a newborn was unusual.” She realized that because her disabilities had taught her how to live with uncertainty years before her daughter came along and that she had “accepted that bodies are unpredictable and that it’s impossible to know what they will need and how they will feel,” she was preternaturally adapted to parenting. This ease with uncertainty, she goes on to argue, is one of many reasons that disabled parents have an edge over nondisabled parents. “We are not surprised when plans fail.” She writes, “In the decade-plus that I’ve been disabled, I’ve learned, through repeated disappointments, that I should expect problems. It’s not pessimism; it’s the absence of denial.” 

In her interviews with nondisabled parents, Slice consistently found that part of the reason early parenthood felt harrowing to them was that they never experienced so much uncertainty all at once. Some also dealt with disability for the first time; for instance, “Nondisabled parents who gave birth via C-section often described profound fear and uncertainty as their bodies were unable to move and function in the manner they had hoped for after birth.” She contrasts that with a woman she interviewed who became quadriplegic after a car accident and gave birth to twins via C-section, who said, “Dealing with recovery was pretty breezy. I didn’t feel great, for sure, but it wasn’t all that bad.” 

These interviews led Slice to wonder what it would look like if nondisabled parenting could be informed by the wisdom, empathy, creativity, patience, and pragmatism of disabled parents. In our current culture, she writes, “A family shifts from one with established independence to one oriented around profound care needs. In a society that values perfection and independence above all, that experience can feel life-threatening.” 

She points out that, in contrast, disabled parents can circumvent the “sinister, society-rending assumption: people should be able to parent without help.” Notably, in considering her own experience of her community joyously offering aid and care upon returning home from the hospital with her daughter, Slice muses, “What if, instead, we judged parents by how good they were at marshaling help for the sake of their children? If that were the metric, disabled parents would be among the best.” 

Another way to change the perception of disabled parents’ fitness, she argues, could be to encourage more disabled people to become doctors by making medical school and residency programs more accessible. In her research, Slice discovered that although 25 percent of Americans are disabled, only three percent of doctors are. She also found that most disabled people consistently rate their life satisfaction and well-being as equal to or higher than nondisabled people. Yet she cites a study by Dr. Lisa Lezzoni, who is disabled, which found 82 percent of doctors believe disabled people have a low quality of life.

“My own experience in healthcare since becoming a power wheelchair user reflects her study results,” she writes. “I never feel quite as pitied as when a doctor sees me. They often ask when I got my wheelchair as if it’s when my life fell apart, not as if it’s the time I was finally able to access freedom.” 

This disconnect is at the heart of some of the most disturbing stories in the book. One particularly haunting one is of a mother, Stacy C., who couldn’t get her newborn baby to latch in the hospital and asked a nurse for help. The nurse instead contacted Child Protective Services and expressed concerns over Stacy’s parental fitness. 

I was so shocked when I got to this part of Unfit Parent that I put down the book and searched online how common breastfeeding issues are in the first few weeks of a baby’s life. One of the first links was a study from UC Davis Medical Center that found that 92 percent of new mothers struggle to breastfeed—92 percent.  

Stacy’s nurse doubted that she could care for her child when she had challenges caring for herself, but Slice’s book powerfully argues that those challenges may qualify disabled parents to be the most fit parents of all.

*Slice’s second child was born after she finished the book, and she wrote about the experience of his birth via a surrogate in a moving afterword.

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Discover more about Jessica Slice and her book, Unfit Parent: A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World, on our podcast, This Mama Is Lit!