This resource supports leading a healthy intimate or reproductive life for people with a disability.
Body
Advocates For Youth
Young people have the right to lead healthy lives, and need sex education that is honest, complete, and accurate.
BeautyAbility https://beautyability.com/love/datingtips/
BeautyAbility is a website for people with spinal cord injury that covers topics such as dating, sex, fashion, and plastic surgery post-injury.
Preconception Care For Women With Spinal Cord Injury
This guide from BC Women’s Hospital and Health Center was designed for women contemplating pregnancy after spinal cord injury. Issues for consideration include altered urinary and bowel function, skin breakdown, deep vein thrombosis, respiratory efforts, autonomic dysrefelxia.
Pregnancy and Spinal Cord Injury
This booklet provides women with spinal cord injury the information they need to make informed decisions when planning a pregnancy. It outlines key things to consider during the perinatal period (preconception, conception, pregnancy, labor and delivery and postpartum) and where to go to get additional information, help and services.
Pregnancy and Women with Spinal Cord Injury MSKTC
Having a spinal cord injury (SCI) does not affect your ability to naturally become pregnant, carry, and deliver a baby, so your decision to have children is made in much the same way as anyone else. You consider the demands and challenges of parenting and how you might manage them. Here are other facts to consider when deciding whether or not you want to have children.
Model Systems Translation Knowledge - Sexuality
The leading source for SCI. Fact sheets on multiple topics - also in Spanish.
Gary Karp's talk: Sex on Wheels
Watch Gary Karp, an internationally recognized public speaker and author, talk about the impact of traumatic change on sexuality and intimate activity. Karp has been living, fully, with a T12 spinal cord injury since 1973 when he was injured in a fall from a tree at the age of eighteen. This excerpt of his 2008 Abilities Expo speech, “Sex on Wheels—The Possibilities”. Follow this link to watch the excerpt, via the Christopher & Dana Reeve Paralysis Resource Center.
Sexual Health Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation
Learn how a spinal cord injury can affect your sexuality.
Sexuality after SCI
This video archive and website is a resource for people living with spinal cord injury, their partners, and the healthcare professionals who treat them. It provides the knowledge and practical information needed to encourage communication and instill hope that love, sex and intimacy are all possible after spinal cord injury.
Sexuality Resources from Stanley Ducharme, Ph.D
This informational website was developed by Stanley Ducharme, a psychologist and sex therapist specializing in physical disability, rehabilitation, sexual dysfunction and relationship issues.
United Spinal Association-sexuality
The United Spinal Association provides active-lifestyle, peer support, and advocacy information to encourage individuals to achieve their highest potential in all facets of life. The Association’s Spinal Cord Resource Center has a dedicated section on Family and Personal Relationships with consumer information articles on Dating after SCI, Parenting after SCI, Love and Marriage after SCI, and other relevant articles.
See Additional resources, and info sheets on the Henry B. Betts LIFE Center search site.
For more reading materials see the LIFE Center library and select "sexuality" from the Tag List or search.
This content is for informational purposes only and may not be comprehensive. Information contained does not imply an endorsement from Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, and does not replace the advice of a qualified healthcare professional. See here for further details.
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Henry B. Betts LIFE Center – (312) 238-5433 – https://www.sralab.org/lifecenter
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