There can be no greater anguish for a woman than to have her children forcibly taken away from her, for ever. The feelings of a father could be equally painful, I imagine. That is what has happened, in a case reported last week, to a mother and father who are considered by Essex social services to be unable to bring up their children properly. The mother has a learning disability and an IQ of 60. The father has also been described by some as having a learning disability, though he has had expert assessment to the contrary.

Their four-year-old daughter and 14-month-old son were taken away from them for adoption last year, and last week a High Court judge upheld that decision. Mrs Justice Pauffley said that their refusal to give up their children was “unreasonable” and their desire to bring them up themselves was “wholly unrealistic”.

I have no idea where truth and justice lie in this case, and I am not going to venture an opinion. All that is clear is the cruel pain involved for the distraught parents. And it reminded me yet again of something that has angered me for years — the painful mess of confusion, contradiction, bullying and skewed priorities that informs the politics of intellectual disability.

On the same day as the hearing I received a letter from a reader that precisely makes my point. (I have permission to use it anonymously.) “I have a sister,” he writes, “now 41, who has a learning disability; she suffers from cerebral palsy and motor dyspraxia. Her mental age was once assessed at eight or nine. She has been a resident in a very small home run by a well-known charity for some years but recently its policy has changed and my parents and family have felt that they have been pushing my sister beyond her capabilities — some of the things my sister has been told she can do if she wants, eg drive a car, have a baby, etc, would be laughable if it were not for the seriousness of the issue.

“Today, our whole family has been shocked to learn that my sister has ‘chosen’ to leave her small group home and ‘live with her boyfriend’. This has been devastating news. Not only do we know that she will not be able to cope with her own disabilities, but this ‘boyfriend’ also has a learning disability, a history of erratic behaviour and suffers from epileptic fits. We feel that the charity and social services have finally achieved their goal; they can demonstrate to the world another ‘success’ and pat themselves on their backs and rid themselves of ‘interfering parents’.”

On the one hand social services and other professionals are encouraging a vulnerable person to move out of a safe situation into a very difficult one and, perhaps, to have a baby. Yet on the other hand social services are very quick to remove a baby from a mother with a learning disability. The contradiction is glaring. In today’s aggressive culture of disability rights, a woman with an intellectual impairment is pressed into taking up her right to independence (especially from her parents), and her right to sexual activity and to have a baby, but somehow, when it comes to her right to keep her baby — well, that’s a very different thing.

I have again and again come across versions of this painful and shocking contradiction, because of my lifelong interest in people with learning disabilities, through somebody close to me. Some years ago a woman with pronounced learning disabilities whom I knew became pregnant. Sure enough her baby was taken away from her at birth (with good reason). When I asked why she had not been protected from getting pregnant I was told the details were confidential, but that everyone had an equal right to sex and to giving birth — but not, it seems, to a baby.

Deeply shocked by this attitude, I began to research the politics of disability, and I soon discovered that this approach was part of a highly developed, rights-led view, which insists on normalisation — the idea that people with disabilities, no matter how grave, have exactly the same rights as anyone else and must be actively encouraged to exercise those rights. It’s easy to understand the good intentions behind this idea — though not the aggressive animosity of the more driven activists in this field.

It’s also easy to understand the idea when applied to people of normal intelligence who have disabilities. But when it comes to people whose disability is having very low intelligence, then encouraging, perhaps pressing, them to exercise their right to have babies is shameful irresponsibility.

Yet some people in social services and care professionals generally are proud of encouraging and enabling people in just this way. A senior social work academic told me, when I asked him why professionals were so obsessed with encouraging adults with learning disabilities to have sex, that it was “one of the best indicators of independence”, particularly independence from families.

A very senior care services manager told me recently that his proudest achievement was to enable a man and woman with moderate (not just mild) learning disabilities to marry and have a flat on their own and two babies; the husband was also blind.

This idealistic professional agreed with my suggestion that this achievement would involve 24-hour support, from a team of three full-time care workers, and that this might possibly be unaffordable. Besides, I asked, what about the children? It is hard to imagine the difficulties of normal children growing up with parents who are tragically ill-equipped to understand their needs.

It would be infinitely better, surely, not to encourage such vulnerable people to have children. It would be better, surely, to encourage them to use safe, long-term contraception. (I am completely opposed to sterilisation.) I don’t think any civilised person would feel able to say to someone with an intellectual impairment that he or she should not hope for love, or for sex, and I don’t think it would be right to put any obstacles in his or her way. But I do think it is wrong to encourage them to imagine that they can hope, realistically to have children and bring them up.

The odds are against it regardless of how much “support” is offered — and it is cruel to encourage them. Most social workers and social services departments are much too wise to do that. There are still too many, however, who remain in the grip of a destructive ideology.

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