Armless and short legs.Alison Lapper was born on April 7, 1965 in Burton, Staffordshire, England. Until the moment of her delivery, her parents and her doctors did not detect any problem.
However, Alison was born perfectly but with a peculiarity that would mark her for life, she would not have arms and her legs would be shorter than normal.
She was abandoned by her parents.In her childhood, Alison was abandoned by her parents. She was four months old when her mother agreed to see her for the first and last time.
He doesn’t know her father. They were workers in a car factory in Yokshire County and separated when she was born. She also has a sister, non-disabled, three years older than the one she barely knows.
Therefore, Alison spent her entire childhood in a handicapped school surrounded by other children who physically resembled her. “We were several children without limbs, as a result of the thalidomide wave. It was difficult for us to acquire balance.
We couldn’t sit without falling over and we were unable to get up. Then, they took us and placed us on a plaster plinth. We were show kids,” Alison recalls with a smile.Without wanting extensions.Since she was three months old, they have tried to implant artificial arms and legs. But she herself affirms that it was heavy and not very comfortable.
“With those devices I felt even clumsier. Since I knew how to speak, I asked that they be removed from me. People abuse her power over children. In fact, these extensions were not put on me so much for my good as for theirs“.When she turned 12 she really understood that she was disabled. “Until then I was too busy being a child.”
But at this time she left childhood for puberty and began to understand the difference in her. She was violently thrown out of childhood to become a woman; the lines of her body were beginning to be designed and she wanted to be beautiful and seductive. However, she knew how to get ahead.She wanted to be a painter.
She did not give up and, at the age of 19, she traveledaone to London to graduate in Fine Arts and then become a renowned painter.
She started painting at the age of three. “I paint with my mouth with small sharp movements of the head, like those dogs placed on the dashboard of the car”, she explains.
Her painting has gained recognition and she has been awarded England’s highest decoration, the Member of the British Empire (MBE) for services to art. She was given to him by the queen herself.
“I don’t know what exactly those services are. I also don’t know who proposed me for this title. The vote is anonymous. I want to believe that only my artistic work has been judged and not my deformity”.
Throughout her life she has had to endure exclusions and looks of rejection for being different, but she has known how to see the positive side and get ahead.She pregnant and abandoned by her boyfriend.
At the age of 33, Alison became pregnant but like her parents, she was also abandoned by her boyfriend but she decided to move forward despite always doubting and fearing that the child would inherit her defect. So she decided to give birth to him a beautiful boy, everything from birth to child care was raised and cared for by her single hand.
Now that her son has grown up and can help his mother with everything, he always takes the model of his mother as a superhero in his heart.
English artist Marc Quinn made a sculpture in her honor entitled “Pregnant Alison Lapper.” The statue was ready to be presented in 2005, it entered a competition to be able to occupy the so-called “Fourth Pedestal” of the historic Trafalgar Square, the white marble statue measures 3.6 meters high and weighs 11.5 tons, it has been there since September 2005 until 2007, when it was replaced by another through another contest.