That is a child that will never hear the pitter patter of rain drops on the ceiling. Hear the frightning crash of thunder in the distance. A child that will never get to watch a movie the way it was meant to be watched, with music, sound, nuances that spoken language may contain. A child that will never hear the sound of leaves swishing as the wind blows them around, or hear the sound of waves crashing on the beach, seagulls in the distance.
There are people that cannot hear these beautiful things, wonderous music to the ears. That is horrible that anybody should suffer such a loss. However, to condem an unborn child to sharing this fate, just because the parents want it, is cruel, and the lowest thing I can imagine. A child that will miss out on life, untold opportunities, a chance to dream of being a rock star, so many things. Just because of some selfish parents. Just because of some selfish parents that have some issues with identity.
How sad that there are no laws preventing this kind of outrage.
And a child that cannot sign will never experience the beauty and subtlety of sign language - the ideas expressed that there just aren’t words for, the physical expression of a thought. The fun of signing in public about the person next to you without them ever having a clue. Being able to talk through screen doors and car windows. Being able to talk when you eat! Does a person need to watch a movie to experience life to the full?
If you never had them, would you miss them? I’m hearing, and I like being able to hear things. But if I hadn’t heard, I wouldn’t know what they are. An experience is not more valuable because it’s obtained through one sense. Beauty and wonder and excitement are not better when heard rather than seen. The world is still there to be experienced, just in different ways.
You don’t lose something you never had in the first place. You may miss out on experiences other people share. Does a child need to dream of being a rock star to be whole? Or could they dream of being an artist, a policeman, a writer, a princess, a king, a dancer, a lorry driver, a carpenter, a prime minister?
Some avenues are shut to deaf people, there’s no point denying it. But some avenues are shut to everyone. Maybe I can never be a pilot - I’m colour-blind. Maybe I can never be a soldier - I’m 4ft10. We all have things that limit us. It’s hard sometimes to look beyond the limits in something so obvious as deafness, but really it’s not the tradgedy you seem to think it is. As I said earlier, most of the deaf people I know would never chose to be hearing.
And what I was saying earlier - growing up deaf in a deaf family. You’re part of an often very close community and culture that’s rich in language, art, support, education, and fun. That’s something a lot of hearing children miss out on.
it’s funny but this same issue was raised in the movie Shallow Hal. (specifically, the “people who don’t know what they’re missing aren’t really missing anything” type discussion)
My two cents: not for people who aren’t deaf to say. You want to know if deaf culture is a culture? Ask the deaf (take a piece of paper, be prepared to write, don’t ask if they can read lips, check to make sure understanding occurred frequently, and share all the information you can. Be prepared for the encounter to be lengthier than you might find comfortable).
It has been my experience that the deaf do have a culture of their own. Sign language, in my experience, is expressive in ways that verbal/auditory language is not.
The cochlear implant discussion, a little stickier.
Does a parent’s right to have the child be similar to himself supercede the child’s right to options?
It comes down to values. What’s more important, culture and societal structure, or progress?
I wonder if it would help to compare it to other cultures that, at times, place people at a disadvantage: (about to step in it here)
such as being racially different. So if being darker than most people carries dangers with it, does a dark skinned parent have an ethical responsibility to do to their child whatever Michael Jackson did to make his skin lighter?
Is it right for parents who are bilingual to refuse teaching their kids two languages for fear that they might have an accent, talk funny, or otherwise look different?
As a hearing child of Deaf parents who grew up within deaf culture, do I qualify? You don’t even need the checklist of How To Talk To Deaf People. And hey, we’ve even got a couple of deaf people in this thread themselves. Isn’t technology marvellous?
I’m glad they have a culture. More power to them. However . . .
Anyone who would alter a child to be deprived of one of the five senses is deserving of the death penalty to me. If you are going to alter a child before or after birth it should be to increase their abilities and not to take them away. I would feel the same about anyone who tried to paralyze a child, cut off a leg or an arm, blind a child, or in any other way disable a kid. Put that mother fucker in a cage or kill them, no matter what their ‘culture’.
You know, I don’t think anyone is going to seriously argue with you that a parent ought to be able to disable an able-bodied child. Really.
But how do you feel about deaf parents choosing to have deaf children, in cases where deafness is genetic? Because effectively, what they’re doing is creating a child they know will be disabled. Should they not be allowed to reproduce?
I was asking whether, since dalovindj feels so strongly about deliberately creating a disabled child, he felt that deaf people who would pass on deaf genes should reproduce, since they’re effectively knowingly creating a disabled child. Or wether he feels that it’s a different situation.
Once again, a culturally deaf person uses a big ‘D’ in ‘deaf’…thus, ‘Deaf’ refers to a culturally deaf person. e.g. handy is deaf, but handy is not Deaf. American Deaf Culture is required reading in our sign classes, in it are several famous authors describing the culture.
Deaf people can sing with sign language, it's called 'Musisign"
It’s far more beautiful than any nonverbal language a hearing person can do when they are singing!
Sign Language is it's own language, refer to Bellugi, Ursula who wrote books on this.
Yes, in the company of ignorant hearing people (aka hearies) deafness sure is a disability. I can tell you that is true from my experience with people on the board & in my community. Just the other day in sign class with a Deaf teacher, some 40-ish student asked if the Deaf could get jobs......
Once again, if you haven't tried deafness don't put it down. He who has, may cast the first stone. Y'all others should duck.
Yes. But unfortunately its a language that only a tiny fraction of the world can understand. Which is why ‘deaf culture’ exists more on a parallel with hearing culture rather than significantly intertwined with it.
And this isolation has lead to the problem of so-called ‘deaf culture’ becoming selfish & arrogant. Parents of deaf children being ostracized for wanting them to get implants, for example.
IMO deafness is something that medical science should work towards eradicating. Both through cures for current cases and preventing future ones. And it is insane to consider this as some form of genocide. That those wanting to achieve this do so because they hate deaf people.
But, and maybe I’m wrong, the case of the parents deliberately wanting to ‘breed’ a deaf child seems akin to them practicing a form of eugenics out of hatred for the hearing.
I don’t get it, Hail Ants. Sign Language is more than one language: there’s American Sign Language, Chinese Sign Language, Japanese Sign Language, etc.
It’s no more unfortunate that only a tiny percentage of the world’s population can understand one Signed Language than it is that only a tiny percetange of the world’s population can understand any one particular oral language.
I refuse to discuss your apparent prejudices in your last post.
So sign language has ideas that can’t be expressed in words huh? As in there are signs that have no translation? Like Ennui perhaps? Everything is translatable, sorry.
So sign language has subtlety, so does the English language. Authors for five centuries have been playing around with it. Music has subtleties. So does the sounds of nature. Sign language is not unique in this.
Deaf people are not the only ones that can use sign language you know. So a person that can hear can talk while eating too. Big deal.
There are far more disadvantages to being deaf than there are advantages. That is why it is a disablity. And perhaps that is why there are quite a few deaf people that want implants. Ever have a person that can hear ask a doctor to take away his hearing? His sight?
That is true, some avenues are closed. However, If I were 4ft 10 and colorblind and my parents had genetically selected me so that I would be, just because they were, well that is different, I would probably sue the hell out of them.
Somebody that was born that way, and cannot help it has to make provisions and not dwell on it. Somebody that was created that way by their parents is not the same thing as somebody that is born with an incurable problem.
Yeah, because you have to be deaf to grow up in a deaf family. Lets take kids that have parents with aids and infect them too, so they can bond with and greater appreciate their parents. :rolleyes:
Lets see: Deaf culture, a bit of language, education, support, art, and fun, or normal culture, all of that, plus have hearing, and not get harassed. Not to mention when walking down the street and somebody behind me yells for me to get out of the way of the dumpster heading towards my back I can hear them.
Or we can go on what you say, and just say that hey, lets all get fat, have diabetes, break our spine, and poke out our eardrums, because these things all have fun cultures… Or maybe we should genetically engineer all the babies of the world to be like this. It is fun after all.
Actually, as someone who has studied multiple languages, I recognise that there are concepts in all of them which cannot be exactly translated to others. This is not just a vocabulary thing, though it’s true that some languages have more words in some areas than others, but also having to do with the intersection of vocabulary with the basic precepts of the language itself.
Translation is hard. There are nuances that are lost every time something is translated; a good translator knows enough to know how to generate new nuances, but the translation will never be identical.
And sometimes something is just plain lost. English has only one verb “to be”; this means that there is a quotation in Spanish that I cannot accurately translate – its irony and effect lies in the distinction between ‘ser’ and ‘estar’, both of which are represented in English as “to be”.
Actually, as someone who has studied multiple languages, I recognise that there are concepts in all of them which cannot be exactly translated to others. This is not just a vocabulary thing, though it’s true that some languages have more words in some areas than others, but also having to do with the intersection of vocabulary with the basic precepts of the language itself.
Translation is hard. There are nuances that are lost every time something is translated; a good translator knows enough to know how to generate new nuances, but the translation will never be identical.
And sometimes something is just plain lost. English has only one verb “to be”; this means that there is a quotation in Spanish that I cannot accurately translate – its irony and effect lies in the distinction between ‘ser’ and ‘estar’, both of which are represented in English as “to be”.
How the heck I missed this thread before is beyond me.
I’m deaf since birth. I sign and speak and read lips and live a pretty darned full life, thankyouverymuch. Hey wow! I just remembered I’m also a musician. (I’m a kickass drummer if I don’t say so myself, and play the bass too.) FWIW, I have never known a deaf person who can’t appreciate music to some extent. Remember that complete and utter silence - hearing absolutely nothing - is extremely rare. Most deaf people can hear at least something. I really don’t think I’ve missed out on much of anything in my life. I think the OP is trying to turn lemonaide back into lemons.
Culture - by one of the many definitions - is the traits and characteristics of a population, be it a nationality, race, species, social group, whatever. Deaf culture can exist just as easily as a culture of online RPGamers. Why can’t it be a culture? Deaf culture is typically considered bound by the language,(and I also gotta disagree with you,Epimetheus, you really can’t translate sign to spoken language exactly, but you can come close enough.) There aren’t going to be ANY traits displayed by every member of a culture. (I’ve been meaning for months to start a thread somewhere asking to define what common traits all humans have, and I can’t come up with even one to start with.) But you can describe charactersitics typically displayed by most members of a group to describe the culture.
I also think that people who were going nuts over the two women trying to concieve with the sperm from a deaf man were looking too much into it. I worked in an infertility lab for a while, and saw (1)many lesbian couples, so there’s nothing out of the ordinary there, and (2) Deaf couples ask if there were deaf donors available. (There were not at the time, but being deaf was not an excluding factor in donor screening.), so again, not a big deal. That case should never have been made public, in my opinion. Why the bloody heck should anyone else care if two people are trying to have a child that they can raise in a loving enviornment. They wanted a child to relate to them through deafness. I’ll have deaf children, most likely. To be honest, I hope I do. Should I not conceive because I’ll be doing it on purpose? Of course you’re thinking it’s fine, as nobody (should) be so brazen to suggest something bordering on eugenics, but here’s the kicker: I’m infertile. I need IVF to have children. Should I be forced to use a donor oocyte rather than my own since they’re “defective?”
Epimetheus, are you deliberately skipping over the numerous times I’ve mentioned that I do not support parents being able to chose whether their child is deaf or hearing?
The point I’m making is not that we ought to thank our lucky stars for deafness and keep it going no matter what the cost. What I’m saying is that you’re consistently belittling the rich and varied culture I grew up in.
That’s exactly my point. Music and spoken language are not unique in their subtleties. The flowery post you made earlier about the wonderful things that deaf people miss out on and what a terrible tradgedy this is - I gave you an equally flowery post on the things they have instead.
A bit of language? A bit of language? Is Basque a bit of language? Irish? Because more people sign worldwide than speak either of those languages. It is a fully formed langauge with its own grammar and syntax and international variations.
No, I have not. You’re asking a ridiculous question - of course no one wants their sight or hearing deliberately removed. What I’m saying is that if you’re born without it, you may not miss it or want it. The majority of deaf people I know don’t.
Yes, deafness is a disability. It is the lack of hearing. But, shockingly, thousands of deaf people manage to not get hit by dumptrucks every day. They even drive! The disadvantages you’re focusing on - they’re generally easily overcome. What I keep trying to tell you is that being deaf is not the terrible thing you seem to think it is. And that, being deaf, you get a support network a lot of people miss out on. What that doesn’t mean is that I think people should be deaf.
This is just being fatuous. You know very well no one is saying this. I was outlining to you the positive things about being Deaf, not making a manifesto for the advancement of disability, and this straw man has nothing to do with what I was saying. I’m proud of my culture and would like to see it continue but, as I’ve said several times before, I don’t support eugenics and I don’t appreciate you insinuating that I do.
I understand the desire to not induce deafness. But to say you want to eradicate it? Why? What’s wrong with having deaf people in the world? It’s not a disease, it’s not catching. It’s a disability but not a fatal one. Deaf people aren’t condemned to a life of misery.
I repeat to you the question I asked dalovindj - in the case of parents who carry deafness genetically, should they not be allowed to have children? They are, after all, knowingly creating a disabled child.
I’m curious as to exactly how subtle sign language is. When I watch the morning news and see the sign language simulcast being done, what exactly is being “said”, word for word, when the main news announcer says,“Iranian Diplomats at the United Nations today spoke out against continued threats from United States to unilaterally disarm their country. In Ireland, Protestant sympathizers gathered together to protest the building of a peace monument funded by a group of German Catholic ministers.”
Since the person doing the sign language usually finishes up around the same time the speaking person does, its obvious that not too many words are being spelled out, so I wonder what is being left out or simplified.
