CRPD/C/GC/3 41. Lack of access to sexual and reproductive health information for women with disabilities, especially women with intellectual disabilities and deaf and deafblind women, can increase their risk of being subjected to sexual violence. 52 42. Health-care facilities and equipment, including mammogram machines and gynaecological examination beds, are often physically inaccessible for women with disabilities.53 Safe transport for women with disabilities to attend health-care facilities or screening programmes may be unavailable, unaffordable or inaccessible. 43. Attitudinal barriers raised by health-care staff and related personnel may result in women with disabilities being refused access to health-care practitioners and/or services, especially women with psychosocial or intellectual impairments, deaf and deafblind women and women who are still institutionalized.54 44. In practice, the choices of women with disabilities, especially women with psychosocial or intellectual disabilities, are often ignored and their decisions are often substituted by those of third parties, including legal representatives, service providers, guardians and family members, in violation of their rights under article 12 of the Convention.55 All women with disabilities must be able to exercise their legal capacity by taking their own decisions, with support when desired, with regard to medical and/or therapeutic treatment, including by taking their own decisions on retaining their fertility and reproductive autonomy, exercising their right to choose the number and spacing of children, consenting and accepting a statement of fatherhood and exercising their right to establish relationships. Restricting or removing legal capacity can facilitate forced interventions, such as sterilization, abortion, contraception, female genital mutilation, surgery or treatment performed on intersex children without their informed consent and forced detention in institutions.56 45. Forced contraception and sterilization can also result in sexual violence without the consequence of pregnancy, especially for women with psychosocial or intellectual disabilities, women in psychiatric or other institutions and women in custody. Therefore, it is particularly important to reaffirm that the legal capacity of women with disabilities should be recognized on an equal basis with that of others 57 and that women with disabilities have the right to found a family and be provided with appropriate assistance to raise their children. 46. Harmful gender and/or disability stereotypes based on such concepts as incapacity and inability can result in mothers with disabilities facing legal discrimination, which is why these women are significantly overrepresented in child protection proceedings and disproportionately lose contact and custody of their children, who are subject to adoption proceedings and/or to being placed in an institution. In addition, a husband can be granted separation or divorce on the basis of his wife’s psychosocial disability. 52 53 54 55 56 57 See, for example, CRPD/C/MEX/CO/1, para. 50 (b). See Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, general comment No. 2 (2014) on accessibility, para. 40, and, for example, CRPD/C/DOM/CO/1, para. 46. See A/HRC/20/5 and Corr.1, para. 37. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Population Fund, UNICEF and WHO, “Eliminating forced, coercive and otherwise involuntary sterilization: an interagency statement” (WHO, 2014). See Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, general comment No. 1 (2014) on equal recognition before the law, para. 35. Ibid., para. 31. See also art. 12 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and art. 15 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. 11