Can Disabled People Get Married?

Define “Disabled”

People with all sorts of disabilities can get married. Obviously, people who have physical disabilities can get married. But what about people who suffer from intellectual disabilities? Can they legally marry? Many people with conditions that can impact cognition such as autism, down syndrome, and mild mental retardation have a desire to get married and legally speaking, they have the right to do so. Just because a person has a condition that can or does impact their intellectual capacity does not automatically mean that they don’t have the right to get married. However, there may be cases where a person who has a disability may not have the capacity to consent to a marriage. As most disabilities exist on a spectrum, one person may have the ability to get married while another person with the same condition may not have the ability. Therefore, you’d need to assess each person’s situation holistically.

Assessing a Person’s Capacity to Consent

Without a thorough assessment from a medical professional or a mental health professional, it’s difficult to determine whether any given person would have the ability to consent to a marriage. However, there may be signs that a person does not have the capacity to consent. For example, if a person is consistently acting in opposition to their best interests, a conservator may have to step in to ensure that the adult in question isn’t making decisions that could actively harm them. Britney Spears, for instance, was placed in a conservatorship after a very public mental health crisis. Since Spears’s father had conservatorship over her person, she was not able to get married or have a child without her father’s consent. Signs that a person may not be able to consent to something like marriage could be an inability to live alone, inability to properly manage finances, and inability to act in one’s own best interests.

Conservatorships

If you have a family member who struggles with decision making, rather due to intellectual disability or mental illness, a conservatorship may be appropriate. However, not everyone who has intellectual disabilities or mental illness need to be in a conservatorship. For example, many people who have Down syndrome are able to drive and a lot of people who have mild mental retardation are able to hold down a job, those with high functioning autism often are able to live alone. As previously mentioned, whether or not a conservatorship is really necessary will depend on the person in question. In some cases, a conservatorship could be used to prevent a relationship or marriage that the family of a disabled person may view as parasitic. This was certainly the case with Britany Spears’s as her family worried about her getting married to someone who could squander her assets (in fairness, it could also be argued that her father was abusing the conservatorship for his own financial gain).

Undue Influence

In short, undue influence occurs when a person in power disproportionately benefits from an action. So, let’s say you get an $8,000 gift from your mother, who is suffering from late-stage dementia, to help save your failing business. That could be considered to be undue influence, especially if you had power of attorney over your mother as well. Undue influence is something that people who suffer from disabilities may have to watch out for. Sometimes those who suffer from disabilities get stipends or other forms of social security from the state. In some situations, this can be quite a lot of money, which may attract those with ulterior motives. If a person is not suffering from any condition that would affect their ability to make decisions, then undue influence is less of a concern.

Ethical Considerations

There are ethical considerations as well, especially when one person has a condition that does affect cognition, but the other party in the relationship is cognitively normal. Though relationships aren’t inherently about who has power, there’d be an obvious imbalance in a relationship where one person’s cognition is average and the other person’s is impactfully below average. As previously mentioned, this could lead to undue influence, particularly in cases where the disabled individual is receiving financial aid from the government or other benefits from charitable organizations. In some situations, specifically where the disabled party is unable to communicate, it could lead to a relationship that the disabled party does not desire in the first place.