But if there’s something legitimately medically wrong with you, it doesn’t reflect on you as a person. Most people have something, however minor, wrong with them. I don’t see what’s wrong with acknowledging it. Saying that being deaf is a defect isn’t saying someone’s a bad or flawed person, any more than treating someone for diabetes or heart problems is.
Your analogy doesn’t work at all. Deafness isn’t a cosmetic problem; it is a major deficit in ability. Being able to hear is better. It hasn’t “made them stronger”; they are damaged, and something like a cochlear implant is an attempt to repair that damage. If someone chopped off your feet would you thank them for making you stronger?
I don’t think she meant “stronger” as in being deaf has given them an overall advantage in life. I think she’s saying having that disadvantage has made them grow thicker skin, which is a good thing, even if being deaf is overall an impediment. That said, I’m with Team Obvious on this one: While being deaf is certainly not the end of the world, if there is an opportunity to cure your child’s deafness, do so, at the risk of missing out on whatever life lessons about adversity your child would supposedly learn by being deaf.
I doubt it has done that either. As I said upthread, one of the effects of deafness is isolation. If anything I’d expect them to be thinner skinned than most people due to a lack of contact.
I think it may be closer to the rationale to say that it has more to do with really belonging to a group, and there is some support for this point of view if you think about the way that language acquisition occurs in developing human beings.
From the point of view of some deaf people, putting hearing first will impair a child’s facility with ASL (or another form of signing) and thus exclude them to some degree with an established community. It’s worth noting that sign language has absolute parity with spoken language in terms of grammar, complexity, and flexibility, and people who learn ASL “as a second language” will never develop a facility with it that is compares positively with people who learn it as a cradle language. (ie; people for whom that natural language acquisition phase of early development went into hard-coding the grammar, syntax, and vocabulary of sign.)
From the POV of some deaf people, giving a toddler cochlear implants will lead to impairment in natural linguisitic facility, while falling short of taking them out of the category of “hearing impaired” - so the person may end up being (to some degree) doubly excluded.
Like you, I would tend to agree that anything that helps someone to get along in society at large would be given more weight than something that helps to get along within a subgroup as a matter of course. Who wouldn’t choose to be able to hear a truck bearing down on them, even if that means that deaf people find them inept speakers? But then, I am not in any way used to thinking of hearing-impairment as part of a cultural identity, and would never pretend to have any insight into the life experience of the congenitally deaf.
In trying to reconcile this with something that is relatable for me, I can allow that I place a very high value on being able to communicate easily and naturally, and I doubt that I would ever choose anything that reduced my capacity in that regard. (ie; as an adult I do not expect to attain anything like the fluency I have in English for any other mode of communication, and I can’t imagine trading that fluency for… well… anything.) When I reflect on this, I think I can come close to understanding the motivations of hearing-impaired people who speak of the importance of belonging to a “deaf community.”
Diabetes and a heart problem aren’t physically evident (unless you have gangrene of course). I’m saying that after decades of being deaf and THEN getting cochlear implants is a tacit acknowledgment that the life you were living previously was subpar. I’m not saying I would do it any differently, I just know it would give me pause. For a baby or child, it’s a no brainer to get them. Vitiligo is a medical condition because, if left untreated and not cared for, can lead to skin cancer (because you are essentially albino where there’s vitiligo).
However the message is the same: by improving the one thing about yourself you, as a person, will improve. Your worthiness in the world will improve, your utility in the world. I got my legs waxed last week (one of the few places I have noticeable vitiligo still) and the esthetician, out of nowhere, starts to tell me “Oh, my bff is a dermatologist, and they have this new spray makeup treatment…”. Everyone’s a critic.
Because of my vitiligo (and its subsequent treatment) I was a classic case of the ugly duckling into a beautiful swan - I was horrifically teased for being ugly as a child, even asked many times by ignorant parents and officials at swimming competitions to leave the race because they thought my condition was contagious, and even when told not, was disturbing to the other parents. Braces and light therapy and a little makeup and I’m regularly told (often to my dismay) that I am extremely attractive, from men (and women!) of all ages. And in the back of my head, it’s echoing “and because of that you are treating me better and are generally nicer to me”. That doesn’t mean I would have done things differently - but it is why I choose not to see further treatment on my legs, hands, feet, and elbows - because it, in many ways, is who I am and a reflection of what I’ve endured.
ETA:
Yes, this.
You’d be wrong on that. They have plenty of contact with people, and are also pretty good about taking things in stride - also, rather blunt in general.
But being deaf isn’t just a physical thing. You can’t tell by looking at someone that they’re deaf, but it does have really serious implications. I’ve worn glasses my whole life (and still wear them). I wouldn’t consider it a negation of the life I’ve led before if I can one day get LASIK surgery (at the moment, my eye doctor has told me I’m not a good candidate but I’ll see in a few years if that changes). If I can’t, oh well, but if I do get the surgery (or contacts), I don’t think it’s a reflection on me as a person in any way. It’s just a very small part of my life.
I guess I just view it as a medical thing and not part of me as a person. That’s how I’ve felt about treating my acne in the past or getting braces when I was in high school. Yes, those are medical issues with physical implications, but I guess I don’t really see it as fixing me in the way that I would see getting breast implants or botox. (Not that I think those are inherently bad, just that I can see why one might feel weird about those.)
A nit pick, but it doesn’t work after decades. One can hear, but it is just disturbing noise. One cannot learn to distinguish spoken language as an adult after being deaf.
No, a cochlear implant has no cords. Well…not in normal use, at any rate. Yes, there is a cord in that video, but that is the “programming cord,” for lack of a better word.
A cochlear implant has two parts. The external part has a microphone, amplifier, and a processor to filter out sounds that aren’t wanted. It also has the battery and a maget to hold it in place to the internal part.
The internal part is mostly in the skull (they drill away part of the bone.) Only a thin wire actually goes into the cochlea. The internal part has a small radio receiver. It gets signals from the external portion (it also gets it’s power this way through induction, so no need for an internal battery.) (I’m wondering, though, if an infant/small child would actually have it as implanted as an adult, since they are still growing…)
It then activates one or more electrodes/channels in the wire. Each electrode corresponds to a certain range of frequencies and stimulates the corresponding part of the cochlea that “hears” that frequency range. More advanced implants can activate multiple electrodes at varying amount of power to provide a fuller range of hearing, though it will still never equal what a fully-functioning ear can do.
The wire that is seen in the video is connected to a computer and software that activates the implant, and also can set up how the filter and electrodes work to maximize the range of hearing.
This link has some examples of what cochlear implant speech sounds like (hard to say if it’s perfect, since we can’t literally out a microphone in that person’s brain.) As you can see (well…hear) the more channels/electrodes there are, the better the simulation. I think the average amount of channels in implant today is 16-24.
I just spent an hour watching these videos. They’re awesome!
Wait. What?
Have I missed something?
FYI, the voice off Deaf separtatists are a MINORITY. Even in dhh ed programs, or Deaf or Deaf families most kids are aided or implanted. Heck there are a lot of hoh as kids folks (including unilateral dhh as kids) who identify strongly with Deaf culture and are in the Deaf ed system.
That’s b/c a) you’re listening to the smallminority of Deaf people who are very separatist. Many of my Deaf friends are very pro “full toolbox” Heck many of us are pro CI. There are even Deafies who are getting them for themselves! Back when HAs were first introduced a lot of Deafies were against them. Now, they are seen as a part of Deaf culture. and b) You’re thinking of it as a hearing impairment. Like we’re hearing people without hearing. Those of us who are Dhh as kids don’t know what it’s like to hear as a hearing person. As a matter of fact there is a Gally university professor who says we shouldn’t view ourselves as being “hearing impaired” but rather as Sighted/Seeing people.
It may be kind of weird for hearing people to think of Deafness as an identiy …but is it really any different from sexual orentation, or ethnic or religious or any other identify?
Yes, it’s different; none of those other things are a defect. If deafness vanishes from the world it will be a triumph of medicine, like the eradication of smallpox. The only real difference is that smallpox didn’t have advocates willing to preserve it in order to preserve their own position.
Der Tris, you’re viewing it from a hearing person’s perspective. Why is it a defect? Is it a defect if a person can actually adapt to and live a rich full life with it? There are disabilty rights advocates (all kinds of disabilties) who say the ONLY barrier is enviromental things and people’s attitudes.
Because they lack a capability that healthy human beings have.
Yes. Someone can “adapt to and live a rich full life” after the loss of an arm, but that makes it no less a loss.
They’re wrong, simple as that. Someone without hearing is lacking an important human capability and no amount of ideological handwaving will change that. Nor is such an attitude in any way noble, it is a short step from walking away from the sick and injured because suffering “toughens them up”.
They’re also missing out on so much. Music, for one thing–there’s this whole art form they’ll never really “get.” Yeah, some people don’t like music, but at least they have the option of being able to reject it. If you’re deaf, you’re deprived of it.
These are minor things that a large percentage of teenagers deal with. (IIRC the stats) At least half middle class and above kids in middle school or high school have braces, and a huge amount of acne in high school and college. Since it’s a shared experience, it’s not isolating. Arguably braces and acne aren’t “medical” - if you have severely crooked teeth and cystic acne, yes, those are medical conditions. But the majority of OTC acne products are salicyclic acid, which treats mild acne, which is what most people have. If you’ve seen a dermatologist for your acne, you already represent less than 10% of acne sufferers. By and large acne is a cosmetic condition, and I say this as someone who had moderate (painful but not cyctic) acne for several years.
Oh. I didn’t know that. Thank you for correcting me.
It’s a defect because it is something that is medically *wrong *with you. If a person is born without a limb, that’s a defect. If someone is born with a heart problem, that’s a defect. I see no difference between those and someone born without the ability to hear.
Of course it is. I’m pretty sure that any condition that requires a significant amount of adaptation and which you can have a good life in spite of is by definition a defect.