| Just leave the deaf in peace
Re the ethical storm over deaf
people's choice to conceive deaf
babies (Insight, 13/4), it's their decision. Their choice. Their
right.
I admire their decision, and applaud their decision not to use
hearing aids. The ``hearing" should not, cannot, control deaf
people's lives. You dream of turning us into hearing. We deaf
are happy, normal, like you.
For more than 300 years you have tried to fix our ears with
medicines or surgery, often unsuccessfully, to make us become
``disabled-hearing". Deaf
history is a history of abuse and physical violence as the medical
profession has tried numerous cures from hot wax to physical damage.
Now doctors want to continue this invasion of deaf
children's heads with cochlear implants (just like any horror
movie).
Can you imagine allowing a doctor to drill inside your skull,
close to your ears, to make a hole the size of a five or 10-cent
coin to make room inside your head for wires and magnets in order
for you to become something other than the person you were when you
were born?
Please leave us deaf people
alone; we are not monsters or freaks.
Berna Hutchins, Kensington
Deaf is a disability
Simon Andersson says there's nothing wrong with deaf
culture (Insight, 13/4). I say to him that deaf
is not fine. Deaf is not OK. Deaf
is a disability. I am deaf and
all my life it's cost me dearly, but I'd still rather be a part of
mainstream society than isolated in a ``deaf
culture".
Wendy Cross, Belgrave Heights
Silence can mean less stress
In the deaf debate (Insight,
13/4), with the exception of an acknowledgment of deaf
people's enhanced remaining senses, I have read nothing on the
benefits of being deaf.
As the hearing daughter of a completely deaf
woman, I have perhaps given more thought to some of the advantages
of deafness. Life today is wrought with stresses; for the deaf
there are far fewer. What I would have given, when my children were
growing up, to have had uninterrupted naps or to have avoided the
needless worry I often felt after hearing ambulance sirens. The
stress of barking dogs, noisy neighbours/traffic/squabbling children
or just unnecessary stress-inducing background noise would have all
been avoided were I deaf.
Neither deaf nor hearing can
realistically perceive the world of the other, so neither can, nor
should, pass judgment.
Julie Duchenne, Blackburn
|