DENVER — Carrie Ann Lucas is confined to a wheelchair. She breathes with the aid of a ventilator. She cannot hear and can see only at close range.

She begins most days about 4 a.m. with newspapers and e-mails. About 5:30, she wakes her three disabled daughters. She and an aide dress the two who use wheelchairs. The girls cannot feed themselves, so Lucas and the aide plug feeding tubes into their bellies. She pours cereal for the one daughter who can eat on her own. She puts the girls on their school buses, the last leaving by 7:10.

Lucas cherishes these mornings, tough as they are, because she knows how hard it is to keep a family together.

She is one of a handful of attorneys in the country whose specialty is representing disabled parents like herself. Her mission: making sure they get the same chance as everyone else to be moms and dads.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 15 percent of all parents with children in the household have some disability. These parents are far more likely to have the government try to take their children away. Even Lucas lives in fear that social services may seize her children. 

“My clients have fought and fought and fought” to raise their children, said Lucas, 35. Her brassy voice wobbled as her eyes watered behind her tinted glasses. “It’s just discrimination.”

Lucas works her cases out of a seventh-floor office at the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition in central Denver. The walls are papered with magazine articles about disabled parents. More disabled people seek help from the coalition than Lucas, who carries about a dozen cases at a time, can handle.

Among those she has worked with was a deaf woman in suburban Denver, whose two toddlers were taken away and put up for adoption after social workers deemed her an unfit mother because she could not hear her children’s cries for attention. Lucas could identify with her — she sleeps with a sound-activated pager that vibrates when one of her daughters calls for her.

Another client, a blind woman in Denver, was refused treatment at a fertility clinic because the staff there did not think she could be a proper mother. She was asked: “How are you going to drive your kid to soccer practice?” The woman lost: A jury ruled that the clinic had no obligation to treat her.

“It’s really indicative of how people view parents with disabilities,” Lucas said.

Still, Lucas readily acknowledges that some disabled people should not be parents. She herself admits that she’s not a perfect parent. “I’m sure there are people who can do a better job than I can,” Lucas said. A wealthier mother could afford to stay home with the children, but that wouldn’t be a legitimate reason to take them, she said. 

Carrie Ann Lucas grew up in a small town 57 miles northeast of Denver. She was healthy in her youth, playing basketball and running track. She went to college in Washington state and studied sports medicine. There she began developing unexplained bone tumors and excruciating muscle pain.

Her illness advanced, and she had to go to Guam and Hawaii for medical treatment. She returned to Colorado after two years, and was eventually diagnosed with a rare degenerative disease called central core disorder that she knew would impose limits on her. She began using a wheelchair and lost her hearing.

Social workers had taken her niece Heather from Lucas’ half-brother in Tennessee in 2000 and placed her in foster care. When Lucas heard this, she made a snap decision. “I wasn’t about to let my niece stay in foster care,” she said.

Tennessee was skeptical Lucas would be a good parent. The caseworker made Lucas demonstrate repeatedly that she could care for the girl and required that she prove she could lift Heather’s wheelchair into her rented van. She visited her niece several times and filled out form after form for almost a year — while the child was in a Tennessee foster home — before Tennessee let her adopt Heather.

Back in Colorado, Lucas ran into trouble. The straps on Heather’s wheelchair clearly made her uncomfortable, so Lucas got rid of the restraints. One of Heather’s teachers reported Lucas to social services for modifying the chair. Another reported Lucas for failing to cut her daughter’s hair, saying she had unrealistically high expectations for the child’s social life by letting her hair grow out.

The complaints, though resolved in her favor, were an indication of the scrutiny that disabled parents face.