The family regulation system is increasingly notorious for harming the very families that it ostensibly aims to protect. Under the guise of advancing child welfare, Black, Brown, Native, and poor families are disproportionately surveilled, judged, and separated. Discrimination and ingrained prejudices against disabled parents render their families especially vulnerable to separation and termination. Once enmeshed in the system, disabled parents have little recourse against the state for discrimination based on ableist and raced notions of parenthood.

This Article argues that the family regulation system not only discriminates against disabled parents but also produces disability. It identifies and theorizes three modalities of this production: (1) construction, (2) creation, and (3) reinscription. First, the family regulation system constructs the social category of disability by assuming parents bearing a disability label are unfit, then stigmatizing and separating them from their children. Second, the family regulation system creates disability by causing or exacerbating impairments that contribute to or cause disabilities among parents and their families. Third, the family regulation system reinscribes disability by failing to provide appropriate services or accommodations to disabled parents and then blaming a parent’s disability when a termination of parental rights occurs. In these three ways, the family regulation system—including the courts, caseworkers, and lawyers who enforce its operation—produces disability.

This Article documents how the judicial decisions and outcomes arising from the family regulation system pathologize disabled people. It argues, however, that while disability is often stigmatized, it is not a negative identity, social group, or label. In fact, disability can be a positive disrupting force in the family regulation system. The Article concludes that disability can be a source of pride, family strength, and personal autonomy. It conceptualizes the act of parenting with a disability as a form of resistance by its very nature. Finally, it offers strategies for disrupting the production of disability in the family regulation system while embracing disability as a positive identity. By unearthing how disability can be constructed, created, and reinscribed by the state, this Article challenges the dominant legal and cultural narrative that disability is solely a medical diagnosis or personal problem.