Have you ever watched people communicate in sign language? They can communicate as effortlessly as anyone else capable of communication.
Perhaps you meant effortlessly if they try to communicate with a hearing person? Well, for one thing, it’s not like the deaf can’t write. Furthermore, hearing people encounter the same sort of problem if they meet someone who doesn’t speak their language. Which is kind of funny when you think about it, because then they resort to gestures and facial expressions - sign language! -to try to communicate.
Well, any kind of culture arises when you get a bunch of people with something in common together. And I think Broomstick’s example of the girl from his/her school is an excellent illustration of why that happens with deaf people - it’s bloody hard to integrate into a hearing world. Which leads me to pose the question to Beeblebrox and Truth Seeker - which would be the easier step towards integrating the deaf into a hearing world? Trying to teach them whatever “hearing” skills they can learn, or for hearing people to learn sign language?
True, but total deafness doesn’t impact the quality of life the same way severe mental retardation does, either.
That’s utterly ridiculous. Even if the child were hearing, she’d grow up surrounded by deaf culture. Her parents are deaf. Most of the people she’d spend her first few years with are deaf. Even when she goes to school and encounters hearing friends, her home life will still be steeped in deaf culture. She will be interested in it because it is part of the lives of the people she knows and loves.
Then maybe we should work on expanding those choices.
Um, Olentzero, that was exactly my point. Deafness is a dis-ability and the deaf do have a harder time communicating with and integrating into the hearing world than the rest of us. That’s why it’s a disability.
As to the answer to your question: In a perfect world we would all understand each other effortlesly. But the world isn’t perfect and the cold hard truth is that it would probably be easier for the deaf to adapt to the hearing world than for all 500 million some-odd Americans to learn a second language.
Case in point: I have a deaf neighbor. We meet for beers occaionally and communicate on a notepad. It’s slow, but it works. We use it because my ASL is limited at best and it is far easier to include others in our conversation by exchanging notes down the bar than to teach every one in that bar ASL.
And exactly how fluent are you when you are writing in a foreign language? Sign Languge IS NOT English! Writing English IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE for signing Sign Language.
Here’s a quick test for you: go to the following URL and tell me, EXACTLY, to include the nuances written there, what it says.
I don’t need a “cite”. This happened to the family of one of my schoolmates. The hearing sibling was removed from the home and was not re-united with his deaf family until he was 18 and able to travel between states without the authorities stopping him “for his own good”. I guess someone, in their infinite wisdom, though he’d be better off being shuffled from one foster home to another because he’d be among the hearing instead of remaining with his disabled parents. But that’s a story for the Pit…
Try spending a couple days among Deaf people who communicate only in ASL and I think you’ll figure out way - there are enormous communication barriers.
I have a deaf co-worker who is wonderfully witty, articulate, and smart – but he can barely talk. Fortunately for him, e-mail is widely used even among the hearing at my company, enabling him to participate in some of the discussions, socializing, and joke-passing he’d otherwise miss.
Just saw this on CNN. The woman defending this trotted out the “deaf culture” bit. When asked if these people weren’t thinking more of their own wants and not what would be most likely make the child a happy and productive member of society, she basically had no answer, other than to try to imagine ways in which hearing might be a disadvantage. It wasn’t persuasive.
The whole thing reminds me of The World According to Garp, with women cutting off their fingers to prove their feminism.
How about this for making it worse?
Let’s say they fail and they conceive a child who does hear.
Do they abort? If not, how is this child going to feel when she learns that she was a “failure,” that her parents were sad on the day she was born because she wasn’t what they were hoping for? How are these women going to raise this child when they have (apparently) made their disability the focus of their life? I’m seeing a kid with a lot of issues here, and hoping she gets help so we don’t read a headline in 2018 “Teenager deafens self with icepick; wanted to win parent’s approval.”
Why can a child with hearing not learn sign language?
But a deaf person can’t hear… unless we get into cochlear implants, which aren’t quite a refined technology yet, and we all know what a bugaboo that is.
I wonder what people would think if I said I wanted my child to be born blind?
These people hope they have a deaf kid, and are taking reasonable steps to ensure that. That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t love a hearing child. That doesn’t mean they’ll call it a mistake or walk around saying “we should have aborted you”. That doesn’t mean they will instantly abort a hearing kid, or will purposefully deafen it, or some other nightmarish situation. They simply have a preference (which you may or may not agree with) and they are in a rare posistion where they can choose in a way that sways the odds towards their preference. Are you saying you’d have no hopes for your child? You wouldn’t somewhere in your heart hope it is tall or sharp-witted or beautiful? And if you had to choose someone to donate sperm, would you not choose someone likley to give you those results? Or would you pick out of a hat because that is magically more ethical?
People do it all the time. Lots of black people choose black sperm donors. Now being black is a disadvantage in this society. It sets you up for racism, a harder time in the workforce, and can lead to problems finding a mate. Does that mean that these parents are irrepsonsible because they want a black baby? Should they be required to have white babies so that their kid can have “every advantage in life”? Or should they have to randomly pick a sperm doner so that if things are less than idea we can call it an accident?
Oh, but that is different. Being black is only a problem because society is geared towards whites. Well, deafness is only a problem because society is geared towards the hearing. I think that most of society, being deaf is less than ideal. However plenty of things are less than ideal. The neighboorhood you live in, your gender and race, your parent’s hope for your future- those can all be less than ideal. And yet we don’t demand that parents only be considered ethical if they live the ideal.
Is it ethical for two married people who are deaf and prone to produce deaf offspring to reproduce, or should they seek out a hearing sperm doner? How is this different?
Before this thread strays too far into the the ethics of the deaf culture, I want to leave one last message concering the women in the OP. They are not doing what I would do, but to forbid them from doing so would be eugenics.
Society is not geared towards whites. Racial prejudice exists in some individuals and institutions, and we are attempting to change that.
Society, like life, is geared toward people who can hear, and also people with two arms and legs, who can see, who are not mentally retarded and do not need assistance with excretory functions. A person who is deaf cannot hear a car horn. They cannot hear an alarm bell. They cannot hear a shout of “hey lady, look out.” For that matter, they can’t hear a cry for help. They are at a permanant disadvantage that will never change.
There is a difference between doing something that is risky and something that you know will have a given result.
And broomstick, that is waaay too broad a claim to make without some support. Is it possible that there was more going on than you knew? Or do you assume if there was molestation going on they would announce it to the community?
I can’t agree with those who say deafness is just another “difference”; as has been said, it’s clearly a disability. Even if everyone else on the planet learned sign language, a deaf person still could not detect sound from the natural world (things about to fall on top of them, people or animals sneaking up on them, oncoming tornadoes, etc.) I don’t really think an attempt to deliberately produce children who lack a basic human sense is ethically right.
Whether or how they should be prevented from carrying out such a plan is another question. Any attempt to stop them might cause greater perils than it would prevent–having and raising children involve pretty basic rights of autonomy and privacy that shouldn’t be lightly interfered with.
This story may, however, say something interesting about at least some of our fears of “eugenics”. At least one fear of eugenics is that it might produce “supermen”, leading to a sterile world in which everyone is uniformly beautiful and intelligent and perfect in every way, or a sharply stratified world in which the offspring of the rich and powerful have insurmountable advantages over the unenhanced underclass. But this story hardly fits the classical notion of “eugenics”; it’s more like “cacogenics”–deliberatly producing offspring who are objectively inferior (inferior, that is, in the detection of sound waves, and not necessarily in any other way).
It may be that basic human cussedness will serve to prevent the “world of identical blond, blue-eyed supermen with perfect pitch” nightmare of eugenics from coming to pass.
Sacks actually addresses this point in the book I mentioned earlier. Essentially, as I understand it, there are three ways the deaf and the hearing can communicate: written media, lipreading and signed English, and ASL. Of the three, the method that takes the most intensive training with the least benefits reaped is the second. Training in lipreading and signed English (which as I understand it is basically using the hand alphabet almost exclusively) takes several hours a day of one-on-one instruction over the course of months. If you’re a child who has other educational needs at the same time, it’s almost impossible to get that kind of training alongside the other skills and subjects you’ll need to learn.
Let me try to illustrate this with a hearing example. Have you ever run across a child who’s just learning how to spell, and wants to show off her skill by spelling everything she’s saying? I don’t mean random words, but actually spelling out the sentence she’s trying to communicate. How far have you gotten before you lost track of what she was trying to say? It’s the same thing for learning signed English. The human brain can only absorb so much information in a short time before overload sets in, concentration decreases, and exhaustion increases. ASL conveys much more information using less effort - akin to using words instead of letters - and takes far less training than signed English. So now deaf children have the time to acquire all the other skills and knowledge they’ll need to become functioning members of human society.
I’m a little troubled by the phrasing of your sentence, as well. If I substituted “immigrants” for “the deaf” and “learn English” for “adapt to the hearing world”, would you still find it an acceptable sentiment?
Will you sit down and think for a minute?! Deaf people don’t need everything translated into Written Sign Language before they can understand it. They learn to read and write in the language of the country they live in. English isn’t a foreign language to the deaf of the United States and Canada; they just use a different means of non-written communication. So if a hearing person who speaks no ASL encounters a deaf person who has no training in lipreading or Signed English, they can still communicate. Admittedly, I would think it’s less effective and more time-consuming in the long run than for the hearing person to learn ASL, there is still no insurmountable barrier to communication between the deaf and the hearing.
Doesn’t every parent have their own wants for their children? The implication with that question is that deaf people are less likely to be happy and productive members of society, and that’s just not true. Smacks of bigotry to me.
Unless the deaf person is by himself, or the only other person around is not in his field of vision and can’t get to him before the falling anvil hits him, etc., etc., etc.
If 'if’s and 'an’s were pots and pans… sure, you can construct a hypothetical situation in which a deaf person is bound to meet Death in a spectacularly nasty manner because they can’t hear, but since there hasn’t yet been a causal link shown between nasty demises and deafness, it really doesn’t advance your argument.
Actually, the fact that they’ve learned to read and write the prevalent language doesn’t negate the FACT that English is, indeed, a foreign language to them.
I’m not saying that it was a common occurance, but whether you choose to believe the story or not I was an actual witness to it. It’s pretty darn suspicious when there are five kids in a family of various ages and the only one removed is the one who can hear, don’t you think? If there’s molesting going on isn’t it more common to remove all the children?
Mind you, the parents went to court to try to fight this. Of course, the records are sealed to “protect” the minor involved. I think in a lot of cases where the state protective services screw up or make bad decisions it’s not the kid(s) being protected.
And when the kid was cut loose from the foster care system he came straight back to his family, and was quite vocal as to HIS take on the whole situation.
Nor is this the only instance of the fitness of a disabled parent or parents having their ability to take care of their own offspring questioned.
So, terribly sorry my life experience is not all neat and tidy in a scientific study, but whether you believe it or not, it did happen
If it was actual molesting going on, it would be unusual to remove only one child. However, it is not terribly uncommon for only one child to be removed for a form of neglect that only applies to that child.
Now I don’t know the details about the family you’re referring to ( and truthfully,neither do you, unless you were present in court or for some reason had direct communication with the social workers.And don’t think the grown child necessarily does either.) so this is purely a hypothetical. Imagine a family where everyone is deaf. They naturally communicate using ASL .A hearing child is born. The parents make no efforts to expose the child to speech ,or even frustrate efforts by others to expose the child to speech (refuse to allow hearing relatives to visit unless they only communicate in ASL). The hearing child will never learn to speak if he doesn’t hear it. At some point it will be too late ,and the child will be permanently deprived of fluent speech. This is nearly as neglectful as the case of hearing parents who refuse to learn and teach their deaf child ASL, thereby depriving him of any fluent communication.
Doreen