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> Some Deaf parents, he added, celebrate when their newborn baby’s hearing test indicates that the baby is deaf too and so can be part of their community. Toug

• throwuxiytayq 3y ago
  Moronic tribalism at its worst. This is why we can't have nice things.
  • BurningFrog 3y ago
    We have nice things!
• Loughla 3y ago
  Deaf culture (with a capital D) is a fascinating study in what it means to have a disability. The definition of disability is impairing one or more major life function. Capital D says that's not them. They just communicate differently. So. If they have that culture, is it bad for them to celebrate that they can share in it with their children? For reference, I think it's bad. But I can see the logic.
  • oefnak 3y ago
    You don't need to be deaf to communicate with deaf people, right? You could learn sign language either way.
    • actionfromafar 3y ago
      What does it mean to be a bat? (Not just be able to talk to one.)
      • throwuxiytayq 3y ago
        Are deaf people a different species now?
        • malnourish 3y ago
          They're referencing a philosophical essay on the nature of conscious experience
          • throwuxiytayq 3y ago
            ok
  • themaninthedark 3y ago
    I can't understand it. Someone who is deaf has a large number of obstacles to overcome and it is amazing that they are able to do so. Neuro-Atypical people could make the same argument, they just think and process things differently. But why wish that your children or anyone else has to overcome the same obstacles?
    • cortesoft 3y ago
      > Neuro-Atypical people could make the same argument, they just think and process things differently. Many have. There is a major movement in the community to treat neurodivergence as something other than a disability.
      • overstay8930 3y ago
        I'm surprised it's taken so long for academia to catch up, militaries have figured out decades ago that these "disabilities" are just people who are good at different things and are assigned tasks that they can do much better than the average person. It is no coincidence that people with ADHD are drawn to certain fields, for example.
        • rocqua 3y ago
          Do you have any such examples? Only thing I know of in a military context is colorblind people being better at defeating camouflage, and I believe that isn't actually used in practice.
          • overstay8930 3y ago
            Israel Defense Forces is probably the best example (they were the first to put it in practice publicly): https://www.businessinsider.com/army-autistic-people-israel-idf-calling-up-military-conscription-2023-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/army-autistic-people-israel-... You can see hits of it through Five Eyes, cybersecurity is hot if you are autistic as well: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/gchq-jobs-recruitment-intelligence-spy-jeremy-fleming-dyslexia-disability-neurodiversity-a9163996.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/gchq-jobs-re... https://hbr.org/2017/12/why-the-australian-defence-organization-is-recruiting-cyber-analysts-on-the-autism-spectrum https://hbr.org/2017/12/why-the-australian-defence-organizat...
  • mbil 3y ago
    A little off topic, but the 2019 movie Sound of Metal explores some of deaf culture and is a pretty excellent film for anybody interested.
  • at_a_remove 3y ago
    I'm curious to know if their stance and logic extends to taking government money, registering as disabled for any kind of benefit, and so forth. If it isn't a disability, don't take the money.
    • graphe 3y ago
      If you can't get aid for it, I don't think it's classified a disability. What if they get rid of it later? I registered for adhd in my old school and I don't even mention it anymore since I didn't need the extra time for exams.
  • coffeemug 3y ago
    This argument is a classic case of "Yeah, sure, I mean, if you spend all day shuffling words around, you can make anything sound bad, Morty."
  • kelnos 3y ago
    I see the logic, but it feels rooted in a sort of state of extreme denial, based on a false starting premise. Deafness, in our world, is a disability. Not being able to hear does actually exclude you from a lot of things that us hearing folks take for granted for the most part. I think it's amazing that so many deaf people are able to function in the world as well as they can. They should be proud of what they've accomplished. But... man, no no no no. And it's not just communication, either. Like... deliberately denying a child the opportunity to hear birdsong, raindrops landing on a roof, the crashing of ocean waves, their cat purring and meowing at them. Hell, being able to listen to human-made music, more than just feeling the vibrations if it's loud enough and the speakers are on the floor. That's criminally abusive. If parents had a child with normal hearing, and deliberately damaged it to make the child deaf, we'd call that abuse. Why is refusing a treatment to restore hearing not at least in the same ballpark?
  • RoyalHenOil 3y ago
    I guess the question for me is, if they have a hearing child, what's stopping that child from being a part of their parents' culture? If a Deaf couple had two children, one with hearing and one without, would the hearing child be excluded from the community and only the non-hearing child welcomed? Or is the worry that the hearing child will leave the Deaf community and move on to greener pastures once they grow up, while the non-hearing child will have no choice but to stay? Either way, it paints a pretty grim picture.
  • hn_acker 3y ago
    My comment is a tangent. > The definition of disability is impairing one or more major life function. A supplemental framing I've heard is that most of the obstacles that disabled people have to work around are obstacles that society can remove. If all of those obstacles were removed, then the disabled person would be enabled, because that person would be able to live, shop, work, and travel just as other "abled" people can. For example, in the case of people who need wheelchairs, removing the physical obstacles would include designing sidewalks with ramps, buildings with elevators, public buses with wheelchair lifts, and home staircases which can support wheelchair lifts. There are also social obstacles, such as social and employment stigma against people with wheelchairs. Some possible interventions might not be socially or economically realistic everywhere, but perfect doesn't have to be the enemy of better. For deaf people, restoring hearing using gene therapy removes one obstacle. Restoring hearing with digital devices (that the user can find support for if the manufacturer goes out of business) removes an obstacle. Another (partially collective) intervention would be adding closed captions (and possibly sign language interpreting) to as many videos as possible. > So. If they have that culture, is it bad for them to celebrate that they can share in it with their children? Perhaps "celebrate" is more like "be relieved" that the children will temporarily lack a distraction - spoken language from neighbors, should hearing restoration methods become widespread - from learning to communicate with the deaf parents. Well, that's too strong of an assumption for me to make: a better assumption would be that the deaf parents are relieved that their born-deaf children will be more likely to understand their parents' experiences. Consider immigrants whose biological children don't become fluent in their respective parents' first language. It's not as if immigrants would prevent their children from learning the predominant language of the city they settled down in. Likewise, I find it unlikely that a deaf parent would actively impede a non-deaf child from learning spoken language.
• PlunderBunny 3y ago
  Wouldn't a child that can hear (and therefore speak) born to deaf parents also learn sign language as a matter of course? I.e. they would be able to communicate with their parents in the parent's preferred medium either way.
  • akoboldfrying 3y ago
    Yes, they could also learn to sign, just as children growing up in bilingual families learn both languages without issues. This puts to bed any question over whether the child can participate in the parents' community. I firmly agree with another commenter that any deliberate effort to restrict a child's sense experience is child abuse. I'll add that I think it's about the most selfish thing I can imagine, and that I put it in the same category as female genital mutilation.
    • lacrimacida 3y ago
      I dont think this is happening too often and I also have a hard time understanding how this could be put into practice unless the community is isolated and cultish. Hearing abled children will develop more or less their hearing naturally. If they’re not completely isolated they will learn to communicate with others even without their parents help.
• Modified3019 3y ago
  Denying their child an entire sense because the idea of the child having a full human experience makes the parent feel lonely, is straight up child abuse. Good parents want what’s best for their child, not themselves.
  • richbell 3y ago
    A popular belief in the Deaf community is that having hearing children is undesirable. Some people argue that things like cochlear implants are "genocide."
    • KingMob 3y ago
      Reminds me of the rabbis accusing Jewish people of marrying non-Jews as participating in a "Silent Holocaust". Way to drive people away, my dude. In some ways, it's a moot point, since iiuc, most deaf children are born to hearing adults, and not within the Deaf community. Genetic treatments will almost certainly be preferred by those parents, and the Deaf community will slowly age up and die out in a few generations for lack of replenishment.
      • kelnos 3y ago
        Well, a few generations after all types of congenital deafness are treatable. The gene therapy in the article so far only treats one, fairly uncommon, genetic cause.
  • IAmNotACellist 3y ago
    >makes the parent feel lonely You misunderstood. It says some of them celebrate that their child will have the opportunity to be a part of their community and culture. From what they've experienced, they can see it'd be a profound shame if their child isn't able to participate in something they've had so much positive experience from. Though that's not universally true. Also a child growing up hearing with deaf parents will have a whole set of problems that they would find challenging to meet, and could fear not being able to help. On top of that, cochlear implants are not miracle devices, and as I understand it, deaf children who get it will still have significant hearing and speech issues and may end up isolated from both sides.
• collegeburner 3y ago
  no actually, we don't. not any more than we want to allow parents to circumsise their children, or feed them garbage until they have a BMI of 35
• kelnos 3y ago
  My first reaction to that line in the article is that it's incredibly selfish of a parent to feel this way, and then to potentially deny the kid treatment that could restore their kid's hearing. But I agree with a sibling poster that this is actually straight-up child abuse. I'm generally skeptical of people who invoke child protective services for all sorts of imagined things, but I think this qualifies. If a child is born deaf, that deafness is treatable, and the parents refuse to treat their child, that child should be removed from the care of those parents, treated, and placed with a family that doesn't put their own selfish needs over the health of their child.
  • suslik 3y ago
    But why? What if an average deaf child is happier than an average hearing child because of their community support, culture, and the sense of identity? I don't know anything about the lives of deaf people - but it definitely looks like there's something to it; what I don't get is why is it so obvious to everyone else.
    • mchusma 3y ago
      Most people would consider deliberately damaging a child's hearing permanently so they can be a part of the deaf community to be child abuse. Similar to paralyzing a child to be a part of that community. It's great that there are communities for the disabled, trauma victims, etc. But those communities should hope that someday those communities are no longer needed.
    • kelnos 3y ago
      You won't know about the level of happiness the child experiences until it's too late to reverse the damage. Or if it's still possible to reverse the damage, it may be difficult or impossible to acquire full spoken language skills, as the article notes is the case for this 11-year-old boy. So the plan is to leave the child without their hearing, in the hope that they just might end up being happier than if they could hear? And we can't run this experiment both ways! There's no way to know definitively which way the child will be happier. So it makes sense to me to give the child the ability to go through life without having to bear the burden of the disadvantages of deafness. And as much as some people in the deaf community will try to tell you that they have no disability, and that they just communicate differently... well, that sounds like a denial-based coping strategy to me. If that works for them to make themselves happy and get through life, then seriously, genuinely, I am glad they have that. But it feels abusive to force their child to have to go through the same thing. Consider a different case: parents are deaf, child is born with normal hearing. What would we think if the parents then deliberately damaged or destroyed their child's hearing -- because they believe their child could be a happy member of the deaf community and deaf culture -- even if it could be done surgically, without causing the child immediate pain or distress? No doctor would ever perform that procedure, and we'd absolutely call that child abuse. While I don't think that's exactly the same thing as denying a deaf child treatment, it's IMO close enough for the conclusion to be the same. (And before anyone thinks to bring up religious practices that forbid certain kinds of medical treatments: IMO those people are child abusers too, if they deny a child a live-saving or even life-improving treatment on religious grounds.)
• avnigo 3y ago
  CODA (2021) is a great film I'd recommend that touches on that (stands for Children of Deaf Adults). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CODA_(2021_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CODA_(2021_film)