Damaging attitudes to disability still common, says disabled MP, decades after eating disorder ‘anguish’

An MP has called for action to “turn the tide of public attitudes towards disabled people”, and to empower young disabled people, after revealing the “anguish” she was caused by an eating disorder as a teenager.

Dr Marie Tidball (pictured, in orange dress), who was speaking during a Commons debate marking International Women’s Day, said her anorexia was triggered by feelings of frustration and “repulsion” with her own body, and which left her weighing less than five stone as a teenager.

She said she was anorexic between the ages of 14 and 18 and had wished at the time that “nobody would notice my disability and I would simply disappear”.

Reading notes she had written about that time in her life in her early 20s – 20 years ago – she said: “I see my body and I feel disgust, repulsion.

“I fear that my amputation took away my femininity, my ability to be yearned for; my womanhood pauperised; trapped in a body that does not reflect my mind or my self.”

She told fellow MPs on Thursday (12 March) that she only began eating more again when her weight had dropped to 4 stone 10 pounds, and realised her body was breaking down and her periods had stopped.

She said: “Somewhere, at the back of my head, I knew I wanted to have children.

“Eventually, I took the pill, my periods started again, I ate more.

“My desire to be a mother gave me a reason to get better, signalled a future and made me know choice once again.”

The Labour MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge said she had spoken to other disabled women about their own experiences of eating disorders linked to their body image and identity.

Two decades after she wrote the notes, she said, “social attitudes towards sex, relationships and disability remain an enormous taboo, which means that disabled women are still going through that anguish, damaging their mental health, causing them to self-harm and eroding their self-esteem”.

Among others who have spoken out, she said, are disabled actor and activist Melissa Johns, who has spoken of having “a strong history of loathing my body”, which “never came from me, it came from society telling me that my body was wrong”.

Another disabled mum, campaigner Sophie Bradbury-Cox, showed the MP comments made to her on social media, including: “There’s something horribly unethical about having children when you’re not able to care for yourself.”

Tidball told fellow MPs: “Those damaging attitudes and a lack of awareness of the issues are leading disabled women to face barriers in public services, including accessing sexual, reproductive and maternity care.”

She said she had met two disabled women – retired Paralympian Carly Tait, and Sarah, an occupational therapist – who found out they were pregnant much later than usual because “none of their clinicians considered that they might be pregnant”.

She said disabled women were “making babies, having babies and being brilliant mothers against the odds”, with a 44 per cent higher likelihood of having a stillbirth.

Tidball said she had asked health and social care secretary Wes Streeting “to put inclusive maternity care for disabled women at the heart of our women’s health strategy, so that our womanhood no longer remains invisible”.

But she said the government needed to go further and “finally embed the social model of disability into women’s healthcare”, and implement the recommendations made for the UK government by the UN committee on the rights of persons with disabilities in 2017 when it found that disabled women faced multiple barriers to accessing sexual and reproductive health services.

She told fellow MPs: “I have lost count of the number of disabled people I have ended up mentoring who have self-harmed and attempted suicide because of sex, relationship and disability issues not being discussed, the lack of services, and the absence of professional expertise to support them.”

She also called on the government to include the representation of disabled people in personal, social, health and economics lessons at school.

She added: “We must turn the tide of public attitudes towards disabled people, and particularly empower young disabled people to have more positive perceptions of self.”

But she said there were “reasons to be hopeful”, with positive examples of female disabled characters on screen and “brilliant disabled women” on social media who are “super-charging the representation of disability and desire, and of being proud and empowered about the intrinsic beauty of our bodies and our selves”.

Picture: ©House of Commons/Roger Harris