The mothers don't realise it, but `designer' deafness is unfair to their child

THEY have been called barbarians, irresponsible, genetic imperialists. Does the lesbian couple who engineered their children's deafness deserve this?
Yes and no. They are not alone in believing that parents have the right to use reproductive technology and selective breeding to exercise absolute genetic control over their children, even if that means limiting their children's potential or endangering their health and welfare.
That notoriety-craving Italian doctor, Severino Antinori, is proceeding with a cloned human pregnancy, despite the technique having produced crippling side effects in animals. A small, affluent coterie of women is choosing to postpone pregnancy until they have travelled, established a career, paid off a mortgage -- and gone through menopause. Yes, post-menopausal mothers can take advantage of pretty egg donors and technology. But there is a fair chance they will be six feet under by the time their children are 30 -- and that's simply unfair to their offspring. Mother nature doesn't always know best, but we pretend at our peril that she knows nothing.
Sharon Duchesneau and Candace McCullough are lesbian, profoundly deaf -- and have practised a kind of reverse eugenics on their children. They live in the US state of Maryland and used artificial insemination to conceive their son, who was born on Thanksgiving Day last year. They have been widely condemned for using the sperm provided by a donor-friend who has five generations of deafness in his family. They did this to improve their chances of producing a deaf child. Before turning to the father -- the same man who sired their deaf daughter -- they visited sperm banks seeking a deaf donor. They were, quite rightly, turned away.
These women factored in serious impairment in the same way others anxiously screen it out. By breeding in a disability, they have broken one of the cardinal rules of parenting: the obligation to maximise one's children's opportunities in life.
The couple insist that deafness is a cultural identity, like religion or race, rather than a physiological affliction. They are part of a growing cohort of militant deaf people who see their condition as no more disabling than, say, being female in a misogynous world or black in a racist society. Although society is far less embracing of disability than it pretends, the depiction of the deaf as just another cultural minority is deluded. Four senses are no substitute for five, no matter how sophisticated one's signing, how heightened one's other senses.
The Washington Post -- which broke the story of the lesbians' selective breeding -- reported that as Duchesneau was giving birth, she needed an interpreter to relay her signed questions to the midwife. Poignantly, the women's five-year-old daughter has already grown apart from a playmate without a hearing disability, as the communication gap becomes harder to bridge.
If you read the long and scrupulously non-judgmental Post article that set off a firestorm of protest, it is hard not to feel for these women. They never felt fully accepted in the hearing world despite their obvious intelligence (they both have postgraduate degrees). Even the ``designer disability'' scandal they have provoked exposes society's double standards: on the one hand, we insist that deafness, blindness and paraplegia are no big deal; that there is no such thing as ``normal''; that the disabled are simply ``differently abled''. On the other, the outrage over these women's selective breeding confirms how we still define disability in overwhelmingly negative terms.
Still, this avoids the core ethical issue: that this couple had no right to make irreversible decisions that severely limit their children's potential. As well as maximising his chances of being born deaf, they have denied their infant son, who has residual hearing in one ear, a hearing aid that might speed up his language and speech development. Instead, they want him to learn sign language. This arrogantly assumes he will always want to live in an enclosed, deaf world, as his parents seem to: they met at a university for the deaf; they work as mental health counsellors to deaf people and their families; their daughter moved to a school for the deaf after attending daycare for the deaf.
Then there is the murkily defined role of the father. According to the Post, he visits his daughter twice a year (that much?). He is clinically referred to as ``the sperm donor''. As teenagers, these children will contend with a largely absent father who conspired to bring about their deafness, a recipe for lifelong therapy if ever there was one.
THESE women claim they are striking a blow for diversity -- for deafness to be as accepted as differently coloured skins. They say they would have loved their son had he been born with hearing, but felt they would make better parents to a deaf child. This is understandable. It is also an inadvertent admission of the restrictions deafness imposes: For these women to feel confident as parents, it was best if their children couldn't listen to a CD, talk on the phone, be best friends with the child next door.
If that doesn't say something about deafness as a disability, what does?