Ears Are For Hearing -- Unless They're Not

There's an interesting article on the front page of the WSJ today (you may need to be a subscriber to get to the article online, but I'll summarize) on cochlear implants for toddlers and the conflict they have engendered within the deaf community. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they have engendered conflict among parents of members of the deaf community.

By way of background, cochlear implants are gizmos that are implanted within the ear, giving a deaf person the ability to hear. The devices themselves have been around for a while, their quality constantly improving, but implanting them in the ears of small children is a newer development. Essentially, a deaf toddler can get the implants and then learn to hear and speak just like any other child. In all likelihood, they won't ever remember having been deaf.

Sounds amazing, right? Like giving a blind person her sight back or giving new legs to a paraplegic. But some people say that it's not a solution for a handicap, but rather the elimination of a person's -- and by extension a community's -- identity. Deafness isn't a handicap, this view goes, but rather a culture, a way of life. An expert on the deaf community from Northeastern University says that many deaf advocates believe that the deaf community is akin to the black community -- an ethnic group with its own language.

You can see the argument from both sides: 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents. For these parents, their child's deafness is a handicap, one that leads him not to function smoothly in the world. Previously, the deaf child had to go to special schools, learn a special language, get special equipment to be able to communicate with the vast non-deaf majority of the population. I know someone who was born deaf to hearing parents -- his parents moved to another state to be close to a school for the deaf. His grandmother became a deaf education teacher. His father became an advocate for and consultant to the deaf community. He is now married to a hearing woman who is a deaf interpreter. If cochlear implants had been available 40 years ago, would this person have had the surgery to correct a handicap? I have to think he would have.

But then there's the other side of the coin. Two deaf people meet at Gallaudet University, get jobs in Sioux Falls, a town with a thriving deaf community due to the presence there of Communications Services for the Deaf, a Sprint partner that provides telecommunications services to the deaf community all over the country. They communicate with the world solely through American Sign Language. They fall in love, get married, and have a child. The child turns out to be deaf. The parents are now faced with a choice -- they can raise their child in their own community, speaking ASL, interacting primarily with other deaf people. Or their child can have cochlear implant surgery and effectively become part of an entirely different community -- a community where people speak and hear and live a very different life. They don't view themselves as handicapped. Why should they solve a problem that isn't a problem? Why rip their child out of the world they live in?

The article is an interesting one, and I encourage you to read it if you have a copy of the WSJ lying around. I can't think of any other physical handicap (and I do think of it as a handicap, even though I'm related to the deaf person I mentioned earlier and certainly don't find him to be deficient in any way) that engenders this kind of circle-the-wagons defensiveness among its community. Just to make my own views clear: if I gave birth to a deaf child tomorrow, you can bet that we'd be first in line for cochlear implant surgery. Not because being deaf is the worst thing that could happen to a person, but where a substantial physical handicap can be fixed, why wouldn't you fix it?