Health Care Challenges Faced by Women with Disabilities

Ask any young woman in India how she navigates a hospital visit and you’ll hear stories of long queues, confusing paperwork, and doctors who rush through appointments. Now add a wheelchair that cannot fit through the door, a doctor who talks only to the accompanying family member, or a receptionist who assumes she couldn’t possibly need a gynaecologist. This is the everyday reality for millions of women and girls with disabilities in India, for whom healthcare is not just inconvenient, it is often inaccessible altogether.

The hidden cost of staying healthy
Why the burden falls harder on women
A healthcare system that was not built with her in mind
The assumption that shuts the door on reproductive care
When “it’s just her disability” becomes an excuse
Family planning and maternal care gaps
What the law promises, and where it falls short
Closing the gap between policy and practice

The hidden cost of staying healthy

Disability rarely means a single visit to the doctor and moving on. For many women, it means a lifetime of ongoing care, physiotherapy sessions, occupational therapy, specialised diets, and regular check-ups just to maintain basic functioning. This kind of care is expensive, time-consuming, and often has to be repeated for years.

Add to this the cost of assistive devices. A wheelchair, a pair of hearing aids, or an artificial limb can cost anywhere from a few thousand to several lakh rupees, putting them well beyond the reach of most Indian households. The government’s ADIP scheme tries to bridge this gap by offering devices free of cost or at subsidised rates, but eligibility conditions, limited implementation, and awareness gaps mean that a large number of women who need these devices simply never receive them.

The scale of the problem shows up clearly in research. Studies on rehabilitation access in India have repeatedly found that only a small fraction, sometimes as little as 2 to 3 percent of persons with disabilities are able to access the rehabilitation services they need. For women, who already face additional layers of financial dependence and social restriction, this gap tends to be even wider.

Why the burden falls harder on women

In most Indian households, healthcare spending is prioritised based on who is seen as most likely to “benefit” economically or socially from good health. Sons are frequently prioritised over daughters, and this bias intensifies when the daughter also has a disability. The result is that many girls and women end up with untreated or poorly managed conditions simply because their care was never seen as a priority worth the expense.

A healthcare system that was not built with her in mind

Even when families can afford care, the health system itself often shuts women out. Government and private hospitals across the country continue to lack basic accessibility features: ramps, accessible toilets, examination tables at wheelchair height, and staff trained in sign language or other communication aids. A study evaluating hospitals in a north Indian city found that lack of accessible infrastructure and equipment was the single biggest barrier reported by women with disabilities trying to access sexual and reproductive health services, and every hospital surveyed scored poorly on this front.

Beyond the physical building, there is a bigger, harder-to-fix problem: attitude. Many healthcare providers simply are not trained to think about disability as part of routine care. This shows up as impatience, a tendency to speak to a caregiver instead of the patient herself, or an outright dismissal of the woman’s ability to understand and consent to her own treatment. Research from Nepal and India both point to rudeness and discriminatory behaviour from providers as a key reason why women with disabilities avoid seeking care until problems become severe.

The assumption that shuts the door on reproductive care

One of the most damaging biases in Indian healthcare settings is the assumption that women with disabilities are not sexually active, do not desire relationships, or are incapable of pregnancy and childbirth. This belief, even though completely inaccurate, leads to real consequences: denial of contraception counselling, skipped conversations about menstrual health, and gynaecological concerns being waved away.

A case-control study conducted as part of the South India Disability Evidence (SIDE) study found that women with disabilities were significantly less likely to receive adequate antenatal check-ups and skilled care during delivery compared to women without disabilities, despite both groups having similar rates of pregnancy. This is not because these women need less care during pregnancy. If anything, many need more monitoring. It is because the system does not expect them to be pregnant in the first place, and therefore is not designed to support them through it.

When “it’s just her disability” becomes an excuse

Perhaps the most damaging pattern is how health complaints from women with disabilities often get filed away under a single explanation: the disability itself. A woman reporting pain, irregular periods, or discomfort may be told this is simply “part of” her condition rather than something that deserves its own diagnosis and treatment. This dismissal means genuine, treatable health issues go unaddressed for years.

Menstrual hygiene is a particularly overlooked area. For women with physical or intellectual disabilities, managing periods can require support with mobility, sensory adjustments, or additional guidance, none of which is typically built into school health programmes, government health worker training, or even family conversations around puberty. The silence around this topic means many young girls with disabilities grow up without the information or support they need to manage something as basic as menstruation with dignity.

Family planning and maternal care gaps

Access to family planning services follows a similar pattern of neglect. A secondary analysis of survey data from Rajasthan found that women with disabilities used maternal healthcare services such as antenatal care and skilled delivery attendance at notably lower rates than women without disabilities, even after accounting for factors like income and education. The researchers pointed to a mix of physical inaccessibility, higher costs, and prevailing social attitudes that people with disabilities should not become parents at all.

What the law promises, and where it falls short

India does have a legal framework that recognises these gaps. The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 specifically addresses this issue. Under Section 25(k) of the Act, the government is required to take measures ensuring access to sexual and reproductive healthcare, with particular attention to women with disabilities.

On paper, this is a significant step forward from earlier disability legislation, which barely acknowledged reproductive rights at all. In practice, though, the gap between legal text and lived experience remains wide. Implementation depends on hospital-level infrastructure upgrades, provider training, and monitoring, all of which move far slower than the law itself. Court cases involving reproductive decisions for women with intellectual disabilities continue to surface, showing that even basic questions around consent and bodily autonomy are still being worked out on a case-by-case basis rather than through consistent, system-wide practice.

Closing the gap between policy and practice

Real change will require more than legislation. It calls for architectural accessibility audits in every public hospital, mandatory disability-sensitivity training for medical staff, and health worker outreach that actively includes women with disabilities rather than waiting for them to seek out help on their own. It also requires shifting the cultural mindset that treats disability and sexuality, or disability and motherhood, as contradictions rather than realities that coexist every day.

What do you think? If you were designing a hospital’s patient intake process from scratch, what changes would you prioritise to make it genuinely accessible for women with disabilities? And how much of the healthcare gap discussed here do you think comes from cost versus attitude?

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Table of Contents

The hidden cost of staying healthy 🔗

Why the burden falls harder on women 🔗

A healthcare system that was not built with her in mind 🔗

The assumption that shuts the door on reproductive care 🔗

When “it’s just her disability” becomes an excuse 🔗

Family planning and maternal care gaps 🔗

What the law promises, and where it falls short 🔗

Closing the gap between policy and practice 🔗