Deafness and disability: A wonderful response

Clodagh Corbett has sent me this wonderful reply to my column yesterday on laws governing deaf embryos:

I am an almost profoundly deaf Oxford graduate and have been deaf since birth. I could not fathom it if my parents (both hearing) had chosen to inflict this disability on me, and doubt I could forgive them if they had.

I of course admire the deaf community's need to feel included and equal, when so clearly we are not, but this must stop short of creating more in their image which is so morally wrong. I myself have played no part in deaf communities, having been a child of hearing parents and attended mainstream education, and yes I have felt isolated, but I am under no delusions that what I have is a disability and that I am unequal to hearing people, through this loss of a sense.

I can cushion it all I like if I chose to, with deaf clubs and exclusive use of sign language (which I do not know, as I was taught to exclusively speak, which I am grateful for for the mere fact of inclusion with the hearing society). But I would never choose any child of mine to share in what is an isolating, lonely and incredibly frustrating disability, because I could never be that selfish. I think these people opposing the proposed IVF law must feel so alone in their disability, despite being surrounded by many like them in deaf clubs, that they feel the need for this affinity in the child to ensure they are not rejected by their own flesh and blood.

Comments

[James Hannam]

I too am a profoundly deaf Oxford graduate with no contact at all with the deaf community. I lost my hearing gradually rather than being born without it, so I know exactly what I'm missing (The Sanctus of Mozart's Great Mass in C Minor to be precise).

But both Daniel and Clodagh are making a serious mistake. There is no question of deaf parents choosing to make a child deaf. Rather, we are being told we must destroy the embryos that will grow into deaf children and replace them with those that will hear.

So if I had been the result of IVF (I assume my disability is genetic), I'd have been rejected. It is not a choice between me hearing and me being deaf, but between me existing and someone else being in my place.

Deliberately choosing deaf embyros is wrong. So is deliberately excluding them. Deafness sucks, but it beats death any day.

[Ismael Klata]

But the choice isn't between deafness and death. It's between deafness and non-existence. Just as the choice for the replacement embryo is between hearing and non-existence.

What you are objecting to is that the choice be made at all. One of the embryos is going to lose out either way, the choice which the legislation makes is that the choice be used so that the one with full capacity benefits.

[James Hannam]

Clodagh and Daniel both wrote as if the deaf person could somehow have been other than deaf. This is not true. The only alternative was non-existance (which sounds like death to me). The situtation you describe - choosing the fittest embryo - is eugenics pure and simple.

[Emily Wright]

What Mr. Corbett's comments highlight is the way that the mainstream education system is failing deaf children. The problem lies withing this abusive system, not within the child itself. A system which instead of celebrating the deaf childs difference, giving him a language with which he can communicate with ease,instead isolates and frustrates him. Eventually leading to the situation that when he grows up he believes he is so inferior that he and others like him should not be born.