Some disability rights advocates are uniting behind an anti-discrimination bill.

Senate Bill 26 would prevent disabled parents from having their parental rights terminated or denied adoption solely because of their disability.

The bill's sponsor and others believe it's an idea whose time has come.

I am a person with a disability muscular dystrophy, and I have four kids, so I have a family and I certainly have had to consider things.

I've been lucky.

I just can't imagine that, like me sitting here today, if that was my disability situation 30 years ago, somebody saying, Hey, you're not fit to be a parent because you can't do certain things.

The original bill was written in the thirties that instituted that bill there, You know, and most people with disabilities were in institutions.

They weren't living in the community.

And so I think that that's one thing that, you know, this is 2025 and we're talking about this stuff that was put into enacted in the thirties.

That's just unfathomable.

And what we're our environment today.

But unless this bill gets passed, your parental rights can be affected, terminated, and your children can be taken away from just because you have a disability.

SB 26 is basically a parental rights bill that we collaborated with the Kentucky Judicial Commission on Mental Health and specifically the Intellectual Disabilities and tries to protect parental rights in adoption proceedings.

It also tries to protect parental rights in termination of parental rights proceedings.

And basically what it does is it prohibits discrimination in those situations when someone has a disability only.

So it would prohibit, you know, disparage in treatment of those individuals.

And what it tries to do is create transparency, create uniformity, and enable those individuals who may have disabilities to have the opportunity to engage in, you know, collaborative agreements with individuals to help them through their situation with their children.

Adaptive services.

And so it also creates transparency by requiring those things to be individualized and records to be kept in the record for up to two years.

It also brings compliance that brings Kentucky compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

So, again, we want to make sure that individuals who may have disabilities aren't treated unfairly.

Hopefully, this will be resolved as we 26 and Kentuckians with disabilities, parents with disabilities can breathe a little sigh of relief that now that they don't have to have to look over their shoulder and have that potential looming.

People with disabilities are the largest minority in Kentucky.

They're the largest minority in America.

So the need for those services is very, very, very much so needed throughout the state and throughout the country.

My anticipation is that will pass pretty easily.

Again, I can't make any promises, but I don't think any of my colleagues would be, you know, opposed to this legislation.

I think it should have widespread support.

These laws that are been around a while, I'm sure were written with some sort of good intent.

But it's changed and people have changed in our ability to be in the community and do the things that we do make it possible for us to be every bit as good a parent as anybody else.

Advocates say the groundwork for SB 26 began when members of Kentucky's disability community formed a coalition to advocate for a parental rights bill back in 2020.