catholic might not be permanent, but its sure pretty sticky.
This, I think, is one of those places where carefully reasoning and faith in that process fail. This is fucked up. It just is. But I couldn't easily point out why.
Its because parents think that kids are teddy bears, not humans on equal footing.
I guess that negates the arguments that people would use embryo testing to create a race of superhumans. Unless they're dwarf superhumans!
I've heard similar things about deafness- some deaf parents don't want their kids to have implants that can restore hearing when they're young because they feel like their children will live in a different world.
These sorts of examples are stock in trade of bioethics courses. The news here is how common they are.
Skimming the article, I couldn't see what portion of these are cases of deafness. The deaf community is behind a lot of these actions. Many deaf activists not only say we should use PGD to create more deaf children, but oppose use of cochlear implants or really any medical technique to restore hearing.
I find it significant that the blind community has not developed any similar form of activism.
I'll read the article and the primary source and get back to you.
Yeah, deafness was one of the traits mentioned specifically in the article. Now, if we could engineer a race of deaf dwarves with chainsaw hands, that would be something.
3: I don't think people are doing this out of a lack of concern for their offspring. It is a matter of group pride. Deaf activists have referred to attempts to promote treatments for deafness as a form of genocide.
I find it significant that the blind community has not developed any similar form of activism.
Well, sure. Deafness creates a language, and therefore a culture. Blindness leaves your ability to communicate orally unchanged -- while other blind people may share experiences with you, they aren't the bulk of people you can talk to easily.
A lot of this is an unwillingness--and maybe an principled inability--to call a disability a disability. I'm willing to believe that deaf people live in a world as rich as my own that's different because they're deaf. But it's still wrong.
There's that blind guy who sees by clicking- doesn't that count as a language? And think of the poor guide dogs...
There's that blind guy who sees by clicking- doesn't that count as a language?
No.
8:yeah, but what does that say about the nature of the disability? Is deafness less of a disability because it creates a culture, or is it just perceived as less of a disability.
The argument against intentionally creating deaf people I feel most strongly is that deaf people cannot appreciate music. This strikes me as a major gap in someone's life. Interestingly, this also applies to people like Teo, who are simply amusical. (I've been meaning to ask teo if he has other symptoms of amusicality, like tone deafness [and I'm not even sure that is the right word, but I think of it by analogy to asexuality])
I'm a pretty fair Teo-equivalent on music indifference, and I'm not tone-deaf. I can sing on key (sorta) and like singing, I'm just fairly indifferent to the emotional impact of most music.
I've been meaning to ask teo if he has other symptoms of amusicality, like tone deafness
Not as far as I know, no. And I wouldn't say I can't appreciate music, I just don't listen to it.
15, 16: But would you want your children to be similarly fucked up and crippled?
People who aren't deaf can still learn the language and often do so- I taught my kid a few signs when he was under 1. I guess it wouldn't be to the same extent if it weren't essential- but then, why does anyone learn Latin?
Not much risk of that. Please, can someone make Newt stop listening to Sheryl Crowe on repeat? I know he wants to soak up the sun, I just wish he'd stop.
20: You're just dead inside, aren't you? Or a robot.
I generally think we should leave these types of decisions to the parents. People generally want to do what is best for their kids.
Okay, what if people selected genetically "disabled" children, though they themselves were not disabled in that way, as a kind of Munchausen's By Proxy Run Off the Rails? Like in Bubble Boy, which I hereby admit to having seen, in which the mother tells her son, for twenty some-odd years, that he cannot leave his bubble or he'll die, except he really can't leave the bubble (in our hypothetical) and still finds out that was a choice his mom made?
I ban myself for using Bubble Boy as the source of a hypothetical instance of MBPROR.
Apo,
Would you oppose selecting embryo's for the presence of a giant cock gene? We have our own culture, too.
Deaf activists have referred to attempts to promote treatments for deafness as a form of genocide.
Perhaps I am an insensitive trog, but this is simply the dumbest thing I think I've ever heard. (Not that you are dumb, just the idea said activists have expressed.) There is a direct advantage to survival in hearing. Anyone who wanted to convince me that there is a direct advantage to deafness is going to have a very long row to hoe.
I am also reminded of contestant #1 from Drop Dead Gorgeous, however, so at least I can smile.
How do blind people tell different dollar bill denominations apart? I recently read something about the Mint making it easier, but what's the current system? Just trust the cashiers and cabbies?
25: Was that a grocer's apostrophe on "embryo"?
the dumbest thing I think I've ever heard
But see, the deaf parents *won't have heard it*.
28: Fuck -- I knew it wouldn't get a pass. I should preview my comments.
26: I agree. Deaf culture is rich and incredible and fascinating, but it's almost like saying the polio vaccine shouldn't have been distributed because adults who've had polio will be lonely and bitter that their culture is dying out, so everyone should have the chance to get polio.
Oh shit, analogy in 31. I double-ban myself. Sorry.
27: They all have their own individual systems—folding denominations different ways, keeping different ones in different pockets, etc. But getting ripped off by clerks is an always looming risk.
Is a double ban like a double negative? You may be obligated to comment furiously now.
I admit to a double standard here, though, that I can't justify. I think it is very wrong to intentionally create a person who is amusical or asexual, in part no doubt because I am musical and sexual. I am also, though, completely a-sports-ical, if I may invent that word. I also see nothing wrong with creating more people like me, people who are completely indifferent to sports. In fact, I hope my children come out indifferent to sports.
29: I laughed really, really hard at that, and feel kind of ashamed of myself for it. But not really.
If I were funnier I'd say something about trying not to insult the rich culture of the illiterate by saying "heard" instead of "read."
31: It's even better than that! It's like if my mom, who had a very mild case of polio as a child, had insisted that each of my sisters and I be given polio, repeatedly if necessary to make sure we really got it, so that we could understand her culture.
I get a free pass on that analogy because I'm extending yours and you've accepted the double-ban. Thanks for that.
people who are completely indifferent to sports
We call those people "terrorists," Rob.
This is a super-stupid article about that echolocation guy.
analogy warning It like saying in response to this video that anybody could learn to unicycle. No shit; it is still impressive.
Also, I just pasted Deaf activists have referred to attempts to promote treatments for deafness as a form of genocide into a client ticket. It's a good fucking thing this is my last week at this job.
I think SCMT is exactly right that this isn't an issue that can be addressed in isolation: it's about whether we're willing to make normative judgments about what it means to be a "flourishing" human being. For some people, deafness is obviously a privation, a falling short of human potential. For others, it's just another mode of being human, not worse or better than any other mode. And answering these questions depends on answering questions about normativity more generally. Well, shit.
I have no difficulty making normative judgments about flourishing, so I'm actually pretty good at condemning this sort of activity. I just get stuck on counter examples. Am I disabled for not appreciating sports? To give my kids a shot at the good life, do I have to give them the chance to appreciate sports? Can I fall back on the claim that sports promote belligerence and machismo, which are contrary to human flourishing?
Maybe Berube will come by and help us with these things.
Here's another odd one that bugs me. I'm not a big fan of the treatment/enhancement distinction. Does this mean that were the technology available, we might become obligated to start adding senses to our kids? If it is a harm to create a deaf child, and the potential were there to create a child who can see, hear, and echolocate, would it be a good to create such a child? Perhaps there is echolocational art that only such people could appreciate.
41 and 42 don't seem so difficult. It we get to a point where not giving the kid some sense or ability would be a significant hindrance, compared to his peers, then you start to have an obligation (costs permitting).
42: You wouldn't want little robby to be held out of flight class and beaten up by the little post-human kids, would you?
anybody could learn to unicycle. No shit; it is still impressive
Kris Holm.
Who has big balls but no testicles?
Correct!
OMG, Drop Dead Gorgeous is one of my favorite movies ever. I could watch it over and over and over and over.
Isn't Drop Dead Gorgeous a horrible Heathers rip-off? With Noxema girl?
40 gets it right. Deafness is interesting (and dwarfism seems to be similar) in that adaptation to the disability has been so successful that it does have its own culture. But that seems to me to be a silver lining on a dark cloud; great that you've found a way to have a meaningful life, great that you have a supportive community, but still not a reason to go about selecting people for defects.
33: Ray Charles had the best solution to that problem: demand to be paid in singles.
I think there's a [recent/current/soon-to-be] court case on the money issue. The solution is to make bills of different sizes, like the rest of the world.
The deafness issue is also (beyond concerns about deaf culture) partially about the worry that focus will shift from accommodation to prevention/treatment, thus leaving those who are still deaf in the lurch. It's similar to the spinal cord injury advocates who were annoyed at Christopher Reeve for focusing on the search for a "cure", rather than making sure buildings are all wheelchair accessible, and so on. It's a valid point, but can easily be taken to an extreme.
48 - No! You're thinking of something else. It's a parody documentary about a small-town beauty contest starring Kirsten Dunst. If you've ever lived in a hick town and wanted to get out, it's spot on. Even my father loves it.
47 - Crisis averted!
46: Rah just bought me the DVD the other day. Best. Boyfriend. Ever.
48: No. You're thinking of the one with that actor who was married to Marilyn Manson, I'd guess.
I'm thinking of Jawbreakers. Not good.
Dwarfism and deafness sound unappealing to us, but what if you could use PGD to produce, say, gay kids (assuming you're a gay couple or just have good taste)? There are definitely some difficulties to growing up gay, but there are some advantages as well, including participation in a vibrant subculture analagous in some ways to the deaf subculture.
Is being deaf or "little" really that bad?
(I obviously read the analogy ban narrowly to allow argument from hypotheticals.)
I have to say my position on this is sliding around. Wanting your children to be like you must be a fairly common sentiment. We also don't tend to shy away from intervention; or rather, we don't like to leave things to chance. Glue these things together in the context of genetic testing and you have discrimination for disability.
All of our qualities can be described as a degree of disability on some scale.
Still, although there's probably no evidence that people with sensory disability - say - are less happy; they may well have fewer choices and be impoverished in that sense. And I don't for a second buy the idea that lifelong lack automatically generates an outlook of acceptance as its accompaniment. You'd be a different person if you were deaf? Not that different, I reckon.
48: You're thinking of Jawbreaker. And "Noxema girl" s/b "vehicular manslaughter girl".
51: Recent. The judge ruled that the Treasury had to start making bills that were distinguishable to the blind, but the Treasury says that every scheme has significant drawbacks. Braille bumps wear away quickly, serrated edges make bills tear more easily, differently sized bills mean we'd have to redo pretty much the entire economy which is based on a standard bill size (ATMs, vending machines, bill counters, self-serve kiosks, etc.).
analagous in some ways to the deaf subculture.
[Comment redacted pre-preview, even, by its own author rather than allowing it to make ogged's point about discussions of analogies.]
differently sized bills mean we'd have to redo pretty much the entire economy which is based on a standard bill size (ATMs
Well, at least it'd keep Diebold busy.
It's like a reign of terror around here with the analogy thing.
You'd be a different person if you were deaf? Not that different, I reckon.
I think this is wrong. I cannot imagine being the same person with even relatively trivial physical changes to myself that would come into play every day, and almost every moment of every day. I'd be a vastly different person if I were deaf. I might be better, but I wouldn't be the same.
57: Part of the problem with determining normative criteria for the good life is that people do seem to adapt. This came up once in a discussion of living wills, but I think it's been shown that people often grossly underestimate their quality of life when considering how they'd live if, say, paralyzed, because they think of all the things that they would have to give up. But most people adapt and find that they're happy, maybe happier than they would be with full use of their limbs.
That wouldn't be an argument for paralyzing people, though. There's too many differences between this and a pre-utero case to be able to make the analogy even if we were allowed this week. But I think it does demonstrate the problem with trying to figure this out: if you're Deaf or Little, you're probably not sitting around longing to hear or to be normally proportioned, so it doesn't seem like you're doing something bad to your kids.
And not that one actually exists, but a friend of mine a while back said that if a "gay gene" is ever found, it should be considered a congenital defect, and treated as such. I couldn't really articulate a satisfactory distinction between that and deafness, though they don't seem exactly parallel.
I bet deaf people don't get to have more sex than the hearing, for one.
65: What was the argument *for* considering it a defect?
Exactly. Do you consider being gay a defect or just a difference, albeit a significant one? Likewise with deafness or dwarfism. "Defect" and "disability" and their ilk are freighted with value judgments, and it really matters who's doing the valuing.
[Goddammit, the "likewise" probably gets me banned.]
But most people adapt and find that they're happy, maybe happier than they would be with full use of their limbs.
Well—that's what they say. And of course they say it.
Alexander Nehamas was here a few weeks ago giving talks and in one of them (well, all, but in one it was more explicit) he said that, according to his present lights, people who don't like TV are missing out on some great things (this is in his new book as well), but that according to his past lights, he could only think that because his standards have been irredeemably corrupted. I think that's silly and that his present lights are right, but I'm much more willing to entertain a parallel (but not, of course, analogous) argument with regard to happiness in these sorts of situations, because I think that happiness in any situation is a sort of Stockholm syndromy thing.
There's a bit in Uexküll's A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men in which he says that when a chick is tied up by one leg and placed under a glass ball, such that its mother can see it acting concerned and generally freaking out, but not hear its peeping, the hen does absolutely nothing. Uexküll says that "it would be quite incongruous if it were [that is, if the sight of the struggling chick were to lead to some action of the hen's], too, as the mother hen is in no position to loosen a noose." I feel that this is relevant but decline to say why.
67: His point was mainly that it interfered with sexual reproduction, so it therefore had to be some sort of defect.
I'd say that there is some valid way of distinguishing between deafness or dwarfism and being gay -- being gay doesn't inherently (that is, for reasons unrelated to social forces) make everyday life more difficult. Hearing isn't just a cultural marker, it's useful, likewise typical limb length.
I think I'm going to get banned for introducing a gay:deaf analogy.
Hearing isn't just a cultural marker, it's useful
His point was that being able to have kids is as well.
It's only useful to be able to have kids if you want to have kids.
I guess, but being gay doesn't make you infertile -- to the extent it does, that's a purely social matter. History (and the present day) is riddled with gay people with biological children.
The main reason being Little (if it's in a way that doesn't come with attached health problems) makes everyday life more difficult is because the world is designed for people of a more usual size. Being gay makes life more difficult because things are designed to accomodate the straight. No? And here I am in analogy land, alas.
"The world" here meaning mainly artifacts, not the natural world.
77: I'm beyond my expertise here, but I think dwarfism is strongly associated with health problems, and other reasons for being Little less so.
76: Exactly --- the argument would be easier to attempt for any effective genetic test for infertility.
You can't overrate utility. Only this morning I found myself wishing for three forelimbs.
See! Discussing the aptness of analogies can be fruitful!
75: Not an unreasonable expectation over a large group of people, but that's a fair point.
being gay doesn't make you infertile -- to the extent it does, that's a purely social matter
I'd think it's more about not being attracted to the opposite sex...those historical examples are more because of the social pressures that drive folks to keep up the pretense of a "normal" life.
I think that the analogy between selection x or y embryo and abortion is a poor analogy, for obvious reasons which I won't get into lest we get off track.
I have a bit of a "eeee" response to the deaf-selection thing myself. But I'm not sure that that's really valid on the grounds of deafness, per se. Would I have a similarly "eeee" response to Rob's deliberately choosing an embryo that lacked the sporty gene, if one could track such a thing? It seems kind of weirdly controlling, and it would bother me, but probably not as much. So I have to assume that part of the issue is the selecting for what I perceive as a disability. And then, okay, the question is: what harm does it do? Is it painful? Does it shorten their lives? And if it doesn't, it seems that my preference is merely that, a preference, and not really something I have the right to uphold as a universal.
Or am I missing something?
The gay analogy is pretty good. Is there anything wrong with gay people undergoing in vitro fertilization deliberately selecting for gayness, if they can? I'd rather they didn't, but I can't say that it's *wrong*.
85: Of the gay people I know, the vast majority are capable of functioning sexually with members of the opposite sex. Wouldn't do it for fun, necessarily, but could manage. That's all that's necessary for fertility (and, of course, turkey basters) -- being gay makes you much less likely to want to be in a heterosexual marriage with an opposite sex co-parent, but you can have kids without that. We don't have conventional social structures set up for gay people to have kids, but we certainly could. (See, e.g., ancient Greece.)
85: but that (a `normal' life) is mostly social pressure anyway ... raising of children is pretty much separable from creating of children.... which is pretty much separable from who you might usually choose to have sex with. LB's point is fine. Are you sure that if it were more socially accepted, we wouldn't see many more gay couples with children?
87: other than making hundreds of asshat charismatic preachers technically correct, you mean?
76 gets it right. Being gay doesn't make you infertile. It maybe decreases the likelihood that you'll choose to exercise your fertility, but that's not the same thing.
Deafness does require a deficiency. Doesn't mean you can't live a fulfilling life (I really like 'Stockholm syndromy'), but it isn't as though you can just choose to hear.
Not that you can choose not to be gay. Man that came out wrong. Find the closest possible world where I don't fuck up that sentence, and there you have it.
See, this is exactly why ogged banned analogies.
OT query for those of you with experience writing academic job applications:
Is there a standard opening phrase for the cover letter that does the work of "hello, I'm applying for your gig, and I'm great, no, really, continue reading!"?
95: try slipping a ben franklin or two in the envelope
Goddamnit! 95 was me. But the letter's for a friend.
In what way does deafness constitute a deficiency, from the point of view of people who have been deaf from birth? And how is that deficiency substantively different from (say) Rob's inability to play sports?
88 bothers me a lot. Is the argument that gayness is okay because "in a state of nature" gay people could reproduce if they really had to and that therefore deafness is not okay because in a state of nature a deaf person would be less able to hear the footsteps of an attacking lion? Because really, that seems a bit silly and beside the point.
See, this is exactly why ogged banned analogies.
So when people wrote sentences that didn't make analogies and mistyped them, you could write this sentence?
That sentence was not in response to your comment, Cala.
96- But maybe the person doing the hiring is blind, so you could just make it two ones.
Kleiman suggested making different numbers of small holes in different denominations- small holes away from the edge won't reduce lifetime that much, allows existing technology to work.
In what way does deafness constitute a deficiency, from the point of view of people who have been deaf from birth?
Are you ready for a really crass answer? Here's mine: the ones who got run over crossing the street because they didn't hear the car horn are probably not going to have much to say on the subject.
Tah-dah!
Now back to not getting involved in the gay:deafness analogy because honestly I have better uses for my blood pressure.
That's good, because it didn't make any sense read that way.
But still, I don't think considering whether the principle 'Do not give your child genetic disabilities' would apply to things beyond deafness constitutes arguing by analogy.
100: Kind of, except that hearing is highly useful not just in a state of nature, but in any culture that incorporates hearing people -- a culture in which being Deaf is only a difference rather than a disability has to be a culture with little dependence on the hearing.
"I am writing to apply for the position of X. I am a Qist currently based at the University of Y, where I will complete my Ph. D. this spring."
You can then go on to say something like "I am attracted by the possibility of working in a department that [does things the way your department does]" or leap right into "My work focuses on Q(1) and Q(2) with a smattering of Q(3)."
I don't think considering whether the principle 'Do not give your child genetic disabilities' would apply to things beyond deafness constitutes arguing by analogy.
Whether this is what is going on in this thread depends on whether one considers gayness a disability.
the gay:deafness analogy
McManlyPants can't hear the call of the sirens.
99: I don't think there's a standard opener that works for part B of what you want, JM, no. But I do think you can do that work by tweaking a standard opener a little for each job. E.g., "Because of my extensive work on proper bra fitting, I am very pleased to see that you have an opening in the emerging field of Bra and Shoe studies. Although my primary research field is Yadda Yadda, I have done a fair bit of writing on the side about the importance of finding a proper fitting bra. . . ."
107.--That does sound nicely functional.
Part B is where you start a new sentence or two; it was part A that was stumping me. Everything I was coming up with either sounded grandiose or servile.
"Although my primary research field is X" is, I believe, a VERY common approach in such letters, for excellent and obvious reasons, and it conveniently makes for a nice way to move into talking about one's research in relation to the job in question.
104: Oh, c'mon. Plenty of people get hit by cars because they don't *see* them coming. YOu'd need to establish that, in the modern world, deafness actually constitutes a measurable risk of an earlier death for that to really be valid.
I'm sure you could establish that it constitutes a measure risk for poverty, but of course that's easily countered by saying that the distinction has to do with prejudice rather than disability.
110: I can hear them fine, I'm just too "differently hetero" to find them attractive.
117: See "measureable risk." Also, if I'm not mistaken, 116 pretty much proves my point that deafness in and of itself isn't a risk; or if so, that walkmans and ipods and average dumbness pretty much even the score.
Another way of approaching it is: The operative moral obligation here is that of parents to provide a good enough (or, if you prefer, best possible) existence for the offspring the bring into the world. Questions arise as to the conditions of that good-enough (or optimal) existence. For which genetic variations do we allow the parents themselves to make these determinations, based on their own conceptions of flourishing, etc.?
And part B of Dave's question is, is there a reason why genetic variation should be treated differently from any other choices parents are allowed to make that we judge to be suboptimal?
Whether this is what is going on in this thread depends on whether one considers gayness a disability.
Not really. You can ask whether your criteria or maxim includes too much, and that's what I took this to be doing: is there something about being deaf or being little that makes it count as a disability.
If the ban on arguing from analogy includes making any comparisons or generalizations, this is going to be a pretty boring particularist little site right quick.
I'm sure you could establish that it constitutes a measure risk for poverty, but of course that's easily countered by saying that the distinction has to do with prejudice rather than disability.
Sure, but unless by birthing this deaf child you're also going to change society to be neutral towards hearing, that's not exactly a useful distinction.
94: I salute your noble if doomed effort, ogged.
If the ban on arguing from analogy
Oh, nobody actually follows any of Ogged's rules.
No no, the natives are beginning to see how they harm themselves.
I would make an analogy if Ogged hadn't banished them from the realm.
Metaphors are still OK, then?
unless by birthing this deaf child you're also going to change society to be neutral towards hearing, that's not exactly a useful distinction.
It's very useful. For one thing, it forces people to say whether they're arguing that deliberately having deaf kids is a moral wrong, or simply a practical one. If the latter, then the problem isn't having deaf kids; the problem is discrimination, and that's where we need to focus our efforts, rather than on on reproductive decision-making.
126, 127: What is it that's supposed to be the triumph of hope over experience? Second marriages?
So they say 'It's a moral wrong because it's bad to deliberately sabotage someone's future happiness.'
I don't mean to sound callous, but, you know, good luck with making a world in which the ability to hear doesn't help.
Where do I go to ban people from arguing that deafness isn't a disability?
is there a reason why genetic variation should be treated differently from any other choices parents are allowed to make
Yes, for the simple reason that non-genetic, impermanent choices (religion, politics, income) can be undone by that child later in life if they so choose, to ridiculously gloss and summarize. The undoing of those choices may be traumatic or involve years of therapy or otherwise have their own potentially negative impacts, but the child can choose later to be someone other than the person their parents had in mind when they made those choices. Deafness or Littleness (is that really the right term?) not so much.
I would argue that both the law and social mores agree already on the grounds that other choices, such as abuse, can be argued from certain insensitive perspectives to also be impermanent and mutable and yet still disallowed. I want to be careful in making that analogystatement, however, because I want to point out that I do not think abuse can just be shaken off or that it does not carry long-term and possibly/probably permanent effects on its victims. I'm just fishing around for something non-genetic that is already seen as taboo.
This reminds of when that commenter got really mad at me because I wouldn't offer an argument for why Dennis Kucinich wasn't going to win the Democratic nomination. Dude, if you have to ask...
The cheap response, ogged, would be to ask someone with such a position whether they would like us to puncture their eardrums so they can prove how great it is or whether they plan to do so on their own.
133: I'd probably say, if I were allowed to talk about anything that is potentially analogous, that there's probably a continuum of genetic-influenced traits where some seem to be morally problematic to choose (r h-c's sports gene) through unconscionable (deliberately choosing to have a child born without limbs because it's society's fault that everywhere isn't disability-accessible.)
And what seems to drive my intuitive responses is the likelihood of harm incurred by the child, and whether that harm could be changed. And this to me seems to be parallel to non-genetic cases; we'll let parents make some decisions, but draw the line at others.
131: Yeah, but you could make the same argument about why black people shouldn't have kids. See the problem?
133: What about choices like language or surgery? Let's say you have parents who deliberately raise their kid to speak a dying language. Should that be disallowed? Or parents who decide to give a kid surgery for a non-fatal problem, like some kinds of siamese twinning, or birthmarks, or genital "abnormalities"? Or parents who give their kid growth hormone because the kid is short (my next-door neighbor's folks did that)? Those are all non-genetic but permanent choices, and although we might object to some of them, we don't think they should be banned (do we)?
What about a condition like Asperger's Syndrome, which (IIRC) is associated with high intelligence? You could make an argument that you would be choosing a child with a much poorer experience along one vector--the social one--and a much richer experience along another vector--the intellectual one.
133: To give an example of something that is not at all analogous, but may nonetheless be interesting in some undefined fashion, we don't let parents choose not to educate their children at all.
132: Bite me, Ogged. If you're not going to let people argue about whether or not deafness is a disability, you might as well disallow posts like Apo's altogether.
8 is exactly right. It's a cultural thing, and since you can't raise a kid to be deaf the same way you can raise a kid speaking the mother tongue, or raise a kid in the right church, or raise a kid who has an appropriate disdain for sports. apo sounds like he has a gut-level disapproval of the impulse to indoctrinate children and that's where the objection to the deaf thing comes in.
The interesting thought experiment, for me, isn't with gayness: If it were possible to manipulate an embryo so that it'd be certain to be a Christian(etc) for life, unable to shed that identity, would people want to do it? I think it's pretty clear that some would ('I would just hate the thought of my son possibly becoming an infidel and going to Hell'). Would this be objectionable, as objectionable as the deafness-producing therapy?
Wouldn't a believing Christian deny that that was possible -- don't you have to have free will for it to count?
139: But we do let them homeschool, even if this means they don't teach their kids about evolution.
I love that this thread has become a veritable carnival of analogies.
OK, so then what is the defining characteristic or set of characteristics that separate choices we allow parents to make from those we don't? If it's harm (or exposure to harm), you really do have to explain why "gay" or "black" is not a harm, but "deaf" is.
I walked by a couple of people on the street the other day: a deaf person getting help with directions from a stranger. It was amusing because the non-deaf stranger was having an extremely hard time of it, but his situation didn't seem unfamiliar to me at all: it was the difficulty of trying to communicate without a common language.
I see enough people going around all day with blaring headphones that I don't think that being able to hear what's going on around you is an insurmountable obstacle, except for in the one big way. It all boils down to language in the end. Why is it hard for a deaf person to get a job? Only because nearly all jobs require you to communicate orally.
Right, but I don't think that's due to prejudice, it's due to the fact that few hearing people speak ASL.
146: I think, unfortunately, that's where most of our intuitions lie: a disability is something we believe is likely to harm you in the economic world. I suspect we're less willing/able to treat "black" and "gay" or "female" as disabilities because--by the grace of God, etc.--many of us live in worlds in which it's at least not clear that there is an economic cost to such a characteristic.
What is it that's supposed to be the triumph of hope over experience?
Honest to God, this is what my mother says about my younger brother. The exact words.
More and more of professional-class work life takes place in writing, these days. A tangential point, but a little bit interesting, maybe. Of course written English (or other spoken language) does not bear the same relationship to ASL (or other signed language) that it does to spoken English (or whatever), and thus even so is often a less fluent mode of communication for Deaf people than for their hearing counterparts.
I love that ogged's 134 is an argument by analogy, albeit disguised as a non-analogy.
I can do whatever I want in this thread, since other people don't seem to realize that they're discussing whether being deprived of one of their senses counts as a disability.
whether being deprived of one of their senses counts as a disability.
My dog has no nose.
How does he smell?
Terrible!!!
We're all just brains in vats, ogged.
153: Didn't you agree in #40 that this was issue at play?
147: Deaf people who can communicate orally still face job discrimination.
Yeah, but 40 was written in my "very very reasonable" mode, now I'm speaking candidly.
What about zero-population-growth adherents who use PGD to select for infertility in their offspring? How do we feel about them?
I grew up with a guy who's older brother was deaf from birth. Not a disability? Put the pipe down.
Although it had advantages. For us that is. The deaf brother was several years older. He'd gotten sick of being teased about it, so he started lifting weights, a lot, when he was like 12 or so. Christ that guy was strong. If we were being fucked with by someone older and bigger than us, all we had to do was the following
"Hey, M, that guy says he's glad you're deaf"
And a severe ass kicking would commence. It was awesome.
I would feel they are hypocrites for having offspring in the first place.
118 -- don't they make same-sex sirens?
If you find that your deaf parents genetically selected you for deafness, can you sue them?
It's especially interesting if you hypothesize that they aborted previous pregnancies on discovering that the fetus would be hearing, then let you go to term on discovering that you had a natural genetic hearing defect. They didn't harm *you*, after all, and you can't really argue that if they hadn't exercised genetic selection, you wouldn't be deaf -- you probably wouldn't exist, and your big brother would be hearing. Very hard to show that you were harmed by their selection, unless you'd literally rather never have been born than be born deaf.
Is it more reasonable, less reasonable, or the same to sue your parents for selecting you gay?
162: they could have one, with a clear conscience.
Selecting or aborting for any trait or disability is just awful.
So your position, Ogged, is that obviously deaf people shouldn't do this, discussion over.
In which case, bring on the analogies and thread drift!
166 -- that's what I was thinking -- but if they are pessimistic and do not trust their offspring to exercise such judgement when it grows to maturity, they might believe it better to ensure that the offspring will not have to stick to such a tough decision.
My parents gave me a ridiculous name and dressed me funny. Disability? Or passing down their culture?
170: Because ZPGers know that selfish breeders like you are going to have 3.
171 -- we'll need pics to decide.
I think it's worth noting that growing up Deaf, capital-D, as the child of Deaf parents, is a very, very different experience from growing up deaf as the child of hearing parents, and tends to involve, among other things, access to a lot more of the possible accommodations and advantages that can accrue to the Deaf (thereby providing cultural and even economic advantages to (help) counterbalance the obvious disadvantages).
It's also worth noting that the above was a hell of a sentence.
No, I think he's arguing that losing one of your senses is a disability. This seems to be pretty hard to deny. In any case, B, all of your examples in 137 are either a) reversible or b) arguably lead to a better quality of life. (This may be the analogy thread, but we can make them good analogies.) The genetic traits we're allegedly worried about will lead to a lower quality of life, most likely, and are permanent.
165 is really interesting, because it does highlight one big difference between the deaf-little discussion and the discussion of other parental choices: the child's existence is contingent only in the first set, so the choices aren't parallel. If I choose not to have a hearing baby, that baby doesn't exist, and a deaf baby does. I haven't taken away anything from that first baby; she hasn't existed. If I choose to destroy my newborn's hearing, I've done a harm. I don't know about the rest of you, but it confuses the hell out of my intuitions.
I'm pretty much generally inclined towards 167 outside of fatal cases, but I'm not sure I have a good reason why.
Selecting or aborting for any trait or disability is just awful.
Why is it more awful than aborting because you're too young/poor/whatever to handle a healthy child?
Selecting or aborting for any trait or disability is just awful.
I'd abort for all kinds of stuff. I'd vacuum out a Down's kid in a heartbeat.
177: Brock would probably say it isn't, since he opposes that too.
There are waiting lists to adopt children with Down's syndrome.
Is it wrong to select for Down's syndrome so you can sell the baby to someone on the waiting list?
Might parents with Down's use prenatal screening to ensure that the fetus also had it? or is Down's recessive, making such testing unnecessary?
175: Sure! There are definite advantages that come from being part of a relatively materially well-off (because most people who are seriously into Deaf culture are fairly well educated and at least middle class), tight-knit ethno-social group that tends to look out for its own. And there are also some developmental and cultural (at least in a pleasure-of-life kind of way) advantages that come from being natively bilingual (as I believe a high proportion of 2nd-generation Deaf children are) in the local hearing language, at least as a written language, and a signed language. Depending on what you want to do with yourself for a living, being bilingual in this way is economically useful too. There is a real and vibrant infrastructure of institutions (e.g. Galludet) that cater to and are dependent on the Deaf.
Hi, I like parentheses. How are you?
I do think that being deaf in the non-Deaf world, even if you have plenty of Deaf resources at home, is clearly a big drag in many ways, and duh, I like having all my senses.
176: I know what you mean about the confusion. My first thought was that if I'd been selected for deafness, I'd be royally pissed at my parents. Then I thought it through. In a way I guess I'd have to be angry on behalf of my aborted sibling.
Might parents with Down's use prenatal screening to ensure that the fetus also had it? or is Down's recessive, making such testing unnecessary?
Not a gene, it's nondysjunction, an extra chromosom.
Right, it's not like waiting around for a deaf baby to happen by involves deafening that baby.
Sometimes my children make me wish I was deaf.
But you could still be pissed in the knowledge that your parents *wanted* you to be deaf, for what certainly seem to be largely selfish reasons. It doesn't matter that they didn't actually cause, just the knowledge that they actively desired it is pretty shitty.
188 -- Oh right, "Mongoloid, he was a mongoloid/ One chromosome to many/ And he wore a hat/ And he had a job/ And he brought home the bacon/ So that, no-one knew...." So how about my first question?
You know how, if you look at a word long enough, it stops looking like a real word at all? I just reached that point with deaf.
191: That depends how you feel about being deaf, though. Not everyone dislikes it.
193 -- chemical assistance?
You don't have to be deaf to be raised speaking ASL. I'm reluctant to believe in a 'deaf community' that's so intolerant that it shuns the hearing children of deaf parents.
So how about my first question?
Down's not real common, but yeah, you could get a few cells and do a karyotype, look for the extra 21'st chromosome (or piece)
I'm not sure I buy 194. Certainly being deaf is better than being dead, and a deaf life is well worth living, but are there really a lot of people who lose their hearing and think "thank goodness oh this is so much better!"?
Well, yeah, clearly I'm not as convinced as you are that it's shitty to root for deafness in the context of growing up in Deaf culture*, but also I don't think it's so shitty, regardless, if you look at it as selection. "We wanted a baby like YOU, not some other possible baby."
*I'm far from unambivalent on this point, but have been trying to put a word in for this side of the argument.
Here's an analogy I just analogy analogy anaglyldgiedled:
What if very poor parents could select for a gene that trust-funded their kid? It wouldn't be a slam-dunk that I'd want that for my child.
189 is completely wrong. Selecting for a deaf child is exactly the same as intentionally making your child deaf.
Just to avoid too much suspension of disbelief, it might be better to cast 201 as some sort of government program: trust-funds for poor kids! (Optional.)
Uh-oh, does 202 count as arguing over an analogy? I withdraw it at the same time as putting my name on it.
197: In my experience, it's not so much that it shuns the hearing kids, but that the community as a whole doesn't look out for them in the same ways. I personally think being a hearing kid of Deaf parents could be pretty close to being the best of both possible worlds, but it's alienating, too. Mostly I was trying to say that once you're inside that community, it can give you a lot of boosts that people outside of it don't get.
203 is definitely arguing over analogy, but I knew that going in, and ogged's rule has no teeth anyway, so I say fuck it.
Selecting or aborting for any trait
Serious question, Brock, just because I'm curious: would you include selecting for benign traits like hair color or handedness? It's still one of your sperm and your partner's egg, so you're just deciding that, say, the redheaded sperm and egg get used.
No, really, I'd have to think long and hard whether or not I wanted to trust fund my kid. On the one hand, their college is paid for. On the other, would it undermine my ability to teach them a sense of ethics? Or hard work and determination? Would they shrug it off, because they wouldn't perceive a need for it as an adult?
209: Yeah, I get it. I almost certainly wouldn't.
209: You could just not tell them about it.
It's still one of your sperm and your partner's egg, so you're just deciding that, say, the redheaded sperm and egg get used.
A question doubtless posed by someone holding a neutral opinion about redheadedness.
Certainly being deaf is better than being dead, and a deaf life is well worth living, but are there really a lot of people who lose their hearing and think "thank goodness oh this is so much better!"?
Probably not, but we're talking about people who are born deaf and have never known anything else.
212: You could have a hearing kid and just not tell them about it.
212: submarine trust funds for all!
212: You could have a hearing kid and just not tell them about it.
Whether or not one has hearing is generally the sort of thing one can figure out on one's own, I imagine.
217: Like explaining a joke to your child?
217: Yeah, this strategy really only works with dwarves.
217: Like explaining a joke to your child?
I don't have a child.
I guess I'd have to be angry on behalf of my aborted sibling.
Not aborted. "Not selected," as Apo points out in 208. Which is why the abortion comparison didn't make sense in the first place, Apo.
12: The argument against intentionally creating deaf people I feel most strongly is that deaf people cannot appreciate music.
Actually, we can, we just do so differently. Whatever it is we hear, that's what we hear and judge. Sure, maybe we can't understand the lyrics, but that's a good thing. I'm constantly disappointed by lyrics when I look them up. Better I imagine they're saying something intelligent than for them to open their mouths and prove me wrong. (Or whatever.)
Might parents with Down's use prenatal screening to ensure that the fetus also had it?
Men with Down's syndrome are infertile. Supposedly, half of the children of women with Down's syndrome will have the chromosomal defect. It would make sense, anyway, and I bet there's plenty of data. Source.
208: it might depend on what you mean by "selecting", but I'm sure you know me well enough to know that, so I'll bypass that part of the question and get to the heart: I still don't like it. It reeks of treating children as consumer products rather than as human beings.
I'm not sure *any* of this should be illegal, mind you. That's a tougher question. I don't personally like or approve of it, is all I'm saying.
I don't think a blonde child is better or worse than a redhead, or a green eyed kid, or a gay kid, or a kid with down's syndrome, or a deaf kid, or short kid, or a kid with a congenital hand deformity (like my newborn). I really do believe they're all equally valuable. Preferentialy selecting some features, and rejecting others, seems in a way I can't quite articulate like a failure on some level to appreciate this.
You shouldn't *want* your child to have any sort of disability or disadvantage or hardship (which is what seems so wrong with selecting deafness), but the truth is everyone will no matter what you wish for them. No one's life is perfect.
221, I was just saying that it was unnecessary to explain my joke. Like it's unnecessary to tell the hearing kid she can hear.
225: Not stone, only mostly. (If you were a woman, you'd probably notice. Most men can't tell.)
My girlfriend in college was mostly deaf. It was pretty hard to tell if you didn't already know.
Scott, should we be typing in all caps?
I still don't like it. It reeks of treating children as consumer products rather than as human beings.
This seems to me to be the heart of my worry about this at least. In the frivolous cases, it smacks of having a designer child, and too easy to lead to abuse (as well as reinforcing the difference between rich and poor.) Maybe I watched Gattaca one too many times.
I've been thinking of Gattaca throughout this thread. Good movie.
So the deaf and nearly deaf give the good loud moans during sex, right? That'd be pretty gratifying to the partner.
I already noted the oddity of writing about deafness. No fair pillaging my jokes. However, it's super-fair to mock w-lfs-n for his claim that I violated his civil rights on that thread, because I totally didn't.
it might depend on what you mean by "selecting"
Oh, right. The process still involves creating and destroying other ones. Duh.
235: Not sure, can't really hear myself moan.
as is so often true, ogged is 1000% right, and I can't believe that any of you are entertaining, even for a moment, the idea that intentionally producing a deaf child when you could just as well have had a hearing one is anything but crazy and extraordinarily cruel. ditto with dwarfism. I really don't know what to say besides you wouldn't fucking be able to hear anything! music, wind rustling in the trees, your mother's voice, your baby's first silly coos. are you people on fucking crack, or what? obviously people can still be happy even when they are double amputees, but that doesn't mean it's OK to chop people's limbs off. jesus.
235/238 -- I see a research opportunity here.
Not sure, can't really hear myself moan.
Now we're finally getting to some real advantages for the deaf. Enthusiam without self consciousness.
235: In my experience (sample size=1), yes.
I think Scott and alameida should fight.
obviously people can still be happy even when they are double amputees, but that doesn't mean it's OK to chop people's limbs off.
Well now, wait...
243: Over what? You think I want kids who can't hear all the bleeps and bloops on a Flaming Lips album? No thank you very much.
Plus, I think alameida would whip me senseless. Granted, she wouldn't emerge looking shiny, what with having put the beat-down on a crippled deaf guy, but I'd still be hurting.
248: Can he cook, or his is expertise limited to tumbling?
So the deaf and nearly deaf give the good loud moans during sex, right?
In my experience (n=1), no.
250: Well that royally screws up our 95% confidence interval.
Yeah, we need a tie-breaker. Who will it be?
Maybe we should normalize for degree of deafness. Is there a scale for that?
228 and 229 kind of get to why the assertion that deaf people are disabled (in the sense of grossly socially disadvantaged) is kind of weak.
230 is why the question of selecting for deaf embryos bothers me too; I'm just not sure there's any reason to object to it on the grounds of deafness per se.
244's right. Selecting an embryo isn't the same as cutting off the arms of a person. C'mon.
Is selecting an embryo for IVF based on certain characteristics less morally fraught than deciding whether to abort a fetus based on certain characteristics?
There's a difference between mostly and totally and congenitally, I think, in terms of how easy it is to get by. My fiancé's sister is nearly deaf. She gets by by reading lips, and you'd hardly notice, except that she barely finished high school due to problems learning to speak as a child (and then read lips, and follow teachers and then it caught up.) Now, all of this can be mitigated by less prejudice and more social programs, but why on earth would you, if you could, deliberately choose something that makes it harder for your kid to thrive?
I wouldn't. I'm just saying I don't know that I'm on firm grounds saying that other people don't have the right to do so, especially inasmuch as the meaning of "thrive" is (presumably) subjective.
Isn't lip-reading and "getting by" frowned upon by hard-core members of the Deaf community?
The point, for these parents, is not whether their kids can thrive in mainstream, hearing society. I'm not saying that I think this is an unmitigatedly good idea, but all these anecdotes about the deaf kids of hearing parents that people know seem to be missing the very real phenomenon of Deaf culture. I suspect few of the kids in question are going to be attending mainstream public schools, for example. They'll be taking classes in ASL.
Selecting an embryo isn't the same as cutting off the arms of a person.
I'm not so sure. Not because of the fate of the embryos, mind you.
why on earth would you, if you could, deliberately choose something that makes it harder for your kid to thrive?
Most definitely, deaf parents who select to have a deaf child believe they're doing just the opposite, just like all the other parents who make weird choices that kids end up repudiating.
Isn't lip-reading and "getting by" frowned upon by hard-core members of the Deaf community?
Yes, I think so.
260: So you're genetically selecting a child to be viable insofar as they remain a member of an insular group. This doesn't seem to me to help the case.
Late to the thread, but my dad has 1.5 arms. He wears a prosthetic arm (well, it's a hook). At ~ages 6 and 4 respectively, my brother and I inquired, separately, when we'd be losing our arms and whether it would hurt. To us, that was completely normal. n=1 yadda, yadda. I think I agree with Bphd.
261: That only gets you as far as the belief is well-intentioned, which I'll grant, as I don't think we have to postulate evil Deaf parents here. That doesn't mean that they're right about that belief, though.
I don't know a way to ban it legally, mind, given that doing so would essentially ban doctors from giving prospective parents any information about their baby.
260 made me realize something. Isn't the argument here really about whether or not we think it's okay for a group to self-segregate, and to take steps to make sure that their children will (have to) do the same thing? The argument that deafness is horribly disabling doesn't seem to hold up against the arguments of actual deaf people on those grounds,* and the argument about which embryos it's okay to select for is kinda problematic too.
*Otoh, I suppose you could make an argument that there are always people in any oppressed group who'll argue for perpetuating the conditions that cause their oppression. E.g., women who argue against feminism.
Sorry, I think we agreed that Deaf-selection is wrong from the gitgo. Everyone denying it (the few) are just on a different plane. We're now untangling the issue to locate the core reason why it's such a perverse thought. Hence the analogies (a poor man's control experiment).
Gayness, handedness, eyecolor, even colorblindness... these are all much more benign traits, but would we still be ok with their selection? And why not go the other way, choosing a super-athlete, braniac, or uberartist?
265: My mom only recently told me that story. All the other kids had T3h Fr34k D4dz.
262b: Again, why is it the genetic component that's such a huge deal here? Almost *all* decisions people make are only valid within a more or less insular group. If you picked me up and dropped me in, say, Japan, I'd have most of the disadvantages that deaf people do.
253: Yes, there is. I'm 92% deaf in my left ear, a mere 73% in my "good" one. Sure, I can get by, but it's not effortless. Which is why -- despite her recent crushing on me -- I have to disagree with B. in 254.
For one, talking on the phone is fucking exhausting. It's like trying read a novel in which four of every six letters are blacked out. Sure, you can do that, but try reading like that for hours on end. In other words, the mostly-deaf have no career in telemarketing. That said, I don't buy the idea of deaf culture, as all the deaf folk I've met actively wanted to participate in the larger society.
I'm not talking about fence-sitters here either: I spent three summers working at LSD (the unfortunately acronymed Louisiana School for the Deaf) and none of my coworkers or charges were into "deaf culture" the way it's been defined by activists.
260: Blessed preview! Segregating deaf kids and forcing them to learn ASL is a terrible solution. Sure, I'm pained on the phone, but in person, no one can tell I'm deaf. That's the way it ought to be, since any deaf kid can learn to read lips.
259: Yes, it is...and the people frowning are idiots.
P.S. I learned today that the MLA panel of interest to some folks here will have an ASL interpreter, which is both cool and ironic, given that I don't know ASL but'll be translated into it.
The question, put generally is this: should parents deprive their children in the way the parents themselves have been deprived, in order to be able to share an experience with them?
I have trouble believing some of you would really answer yes to this.
271: That's okay, SEK. God knows I can't possibly have a crush on a deaf guy. Ew.
Look, I don't actually want to endorse selecting for these kinds of traits, or indeed for redheadedness. I just want to point out some reasons why anyone would want to do it and some aspects of the context of that choice that might not be obvious.
273: We are icky, no doubt, plus we're completely oblivious and sleep through all the hot sex happening in within 70 ft. Why would anyone like that?
266: Oh, well, if we're trotting out actual deaf people as poster children, I suppose I have nothing further to say. Come on. That's a bullshit manuever.
The argument is about whether it's okay to choose to give a child a permanent disability so they can share in the (valuable) culture that has been created by people with that disability. The fact that it's a small subculture is secondary, but related to the extent of the disability. If half of the American population were deaf, it wouldn't be an issue, but they aren't and it is.
272: No, but I wouldn't define existence within X culture as merely "sharing an experience," either. I could see, for instance, why parents would insist that their children commute to college, rather than letting them have the experience of going away and living in dorms, because they're invested in a culture of close family bonds. Parents deprive their kids of experiences they themselves haven't had *all the time*, for reasons from "keeping them safe" to (mistakenly) thinking that experiences they haven't had hold no value.
I'm perfectly willing to entertain, say, the argument that deaf parents who want their kids to be deaf may be (say) deliberately limiting their kids out of abandonment fears or some such. But I don't think that any of the arguments that have been made in this thread are very convincing.
should parents deprive their children in the way the parents themselves have been deprived, in order to be able to share an experience with them?
This is why I only let my kids sleep four hours a night.
trotting out actual deaf people as poster children,
???
278: Well no wonder they crack you in the nuts with plastic weapons, apo.
275: Oh, really? So you're saying I don't have to get a separate room after all?
279: Actual deaf people think their lives aren't grossly disadvantaged, therefore any argument that thinks that being deaf isn't a disability is wrong because a deaf person agrees. Bullshit manuever.
Segregating deaf kids and forcing them to learn ASL
That seems like a weird way to think of it if they're born into a family of ASL speakers. (Again, I'm not actually RAH RAH Deaf separatism. In fact I feel fairly ooky about it, but here we are.)
You of all people, B, should lay off the analogies.
275: He's mostly deaf, bitchphd, not mostly blind.
so you'll have to turn off the lights.
any deaf kid can learn to read lips
Is this really true? I mean, I suppose it is on some level, but it seems like reading lips would be considerably more difficult for someone who was born completely deaf and only knows English as a second language.
I also feel ooky about speaking in any way for a position that I know only at second hand, primarily through people I know academically (ASL linguists; Galludet professors and grad students) and things I've read. Yay, me.
Plus, I can't even spell Gallaudet.
I believe we should stop procreating altogether.
271, 288: As far as any deaf kid learning to read lips, yeah they seem to do ok, but in my experience that doesn't carry over to speaking.
I used to know a bunch of deaf youths; while they were all used to it, I can't say they all felt the same way about it. One kid kept getting thrown out of dance clubs because people thought he was really drunk and slurring his words. He and three others had never heard at all. They told me lipreading was more difficult at first but they picked it up ok. I could understand him ok, but one of the others I never got the trick of....
in 292, by `understanding', I mean their spoken english. We make out ok in pidgin sign. These kids were hopless to learn ASL from because they signed in almost pure slang, as far as I could see.
should parents deprive their children in the way the parents themselves have been deprived, in order to be able to share an experience with them?
The generality has to be stated better than that. What does deprived mean? Isn't there a form of deprivation in the children of deaf parents not being able to share the experience of deafness? Surely the people who select feel this way.
How's this: Should parents inflict a permative negative attribute on their children for whatever reason?
Next we can get on to achieving total consensus that deafness is a negative attribute.
Gayness is totally different from deafness. Being gay doesn't intrinsically make one's life worse (although if you live in, say, Saudi Arabia, it sure would). Surely being deaf does make one's life worse. I venture to say that if you surveyed hearing people, they'd be willing to pay a lot of money to not go deaf, and if you surveyed deaf people, most of them would be willing to pay a lot of money to be able to hear. Surely one's life is richer if one can talk with everyone who speaks your (spoken) language, not just the few people who know sign language. The range of jobs you can do, people you can date/marry, etc. is also a lot larger if you can hear than if you can't. (Of course, being gay has a negative impact on the latter, but at least if you live in a big city you presumably can find significant numbers of other gay folks.) What kind of fucked-up clinic would agree to help parents in this sick endeavor, anyway? Sportiness I don't know about. I'm not sporty at all myself. Maybe the average sporty person is happier than the average non-sporty person, or not -- who knows? I certainly wouldn't count non-sportiness as being as serious a disability as deafness. I hope these kids whose parents deliberately made them deaf sue the assholes.
Oh, and the kids should surely sue the goddam clinics who assisted in making them deaf. The parents would have a good chance of getting off on parent-child tort immunity, but I don't see how the clinics would defend the suit. I wouldn't want to be their lawyer.
We seem to be having two conversations. One, about the differently-abled* subcultures. The other, about genetic engineering. Distinguish wherein you are arguing, por favor.
*Chicago told me not to hyphenate; fuck Chicago right now.
I think most of the discussion has been about subcultures, actually. Genetic engineering hasn't come up much.
Here's another hypothetical: what if genes were identified that made people more likely to be religious or irreligious? What if my wife and I, as atheists, selected the atheist gene for our kid? No doubt serious believers would consider that child abuse, since they'd think we'd thereby consigned the kid to hell. What if studies showed that believers were a lot happier than non-believers? (I sometimes think I'd be happier if I thought God was watching over me and all that, even though IMO I'd be deceiving myself.)
298: I've skimmed, but I maintain that a discussion of "making kids deaf" is very distinct from "what's it like to be the hearing-enabled child of deaf parents." Both of which are interesting, of course, but different.
Yes, but the discussion of "making kids deaf" has mainly been within the context of why someone would do such a thing etc., rather than focused on the technology.
I'm not sure I see the distinction, teo. I was using "genetic engineering" as shorthand for "doing such a thing." I may have gotten a bit fast 'n' loose with the terminology.
Quelle coïaut;ncidence. My sister is planning a genetic makeup on four generations in my family for progressive hearing loss. The likelihood of actually isolating the particular gene that has caused my mother and all her siblings and her parents to need strong hearing aids by about forty seems small to me, but if we were to find it, I would seriously consider maximizing the odds of not passing it along.
The only hesitation I might have, and it's really not much of one, would come from some silly notion that naturally shared genetic quirks bind families together. But then I might still be bitter that I didn't get the apparently not dominant melon-head trait.
Genetic engineering in general doesn't bother me -- except if you're selecting for traits like deafness that most people would consider very undesirable. If someone selected genes that would make their kid homely by most people's reckoning, that would also seem warped to me -- though not as bad as selecting for deafness. (I realize "good-looking people" aren't better people than "homely people," but deliberately making one's kid's life harder seems fucked up. I guess you could make the same argument for selecting for the gay gene, though.) If I could select, say, red hair, for my daughter I'd seriously consider it -- I love red hair. I would certainly select certain traits like high intelligence, absence of depression and so forth for my kid if that were possible.
Sex selection troubles me because (a) in a lot of cultures everyone who does it selects boys, so you end up with a disproportion of boys and girls, and (b) such people are acting on their perception that boys are better than girls, which is offensive. You could argue that it's logical, I suppose -- if men in your culture have a better life than women, why not give your kid a better life?
303: I'm pretty sure you and I agree, but I may not have stated my position very clearly. What specifically that I've said do you disagree with?
You said we were having two conversations. I think we're only having one.
Oh. I was distinguishing between the coments that seem to be about interacting with the deaf community (and other communities) and their worth as communities, and the comments that refer to actively intervening in the in-vitro developmental process. I may have been way off in right field on this one.
Yeah, see, I'd say all those comments are part of the same conversation, just looking at it from different angles.
You know, I was going to buy you a beer when we met. You're really testing me this mornin'.
The gay:Deaf analogy is much better than most people seem willing to admit. I say this having a brother who was Deaf until he started hearing at around age 2 (um, we're not quite sure how that happened, when he was adopted his brain didn't respond to sound, and then at some point it started doing so), and who's now gay. If you don't think that being gay is really disadvantageous that's because you live in one of the few bubbles where it isn't. And you know what, there are also bubbles where being Deaf also isn't disadvantageous. If my brother had to choose between being Deaf and gay at this point, I'd be shocked if he didn't choose Deaf. Now I know that's unusually since most people aren't in fundamentalist families where everyone signs, but hey, we're talking about people in particular peculiar familes.
In Martha's Vineyard being Deaf wasn't a disadvantage because everyone signed. People weren't even able to remember which of their friends were Deaf and which weren't. Furthermore, until the invention quieter means of printing, Deaf people earned more money on average than hearing people (printing jobs were good high-paying union jobs).
Speaking Irish at home instead of English is also disadvantagous, but parents do it because they want to preserve their subculture. And we don't say they're evil and wrong for doing so. Culture, community, and family are important and it's obtuse to ignore that.
I just call 'em as I see 'em, Stan.
312: Yadda, yadda, yadda. I'm going to sleep. I'll e-mail you tomorrow about beer-buying and why you owe me several.
you people who are ok with hanicapping your kids are just crazy. really crazy.
281: Oh, really? So you're saying I don't have to get a separate room after all?
Well, the hearing-enabled Canadian I'm rooming with may have something to say about this...
292: As far as any deaf kid learning to read lips, yeah they seem to do ok, but in my experience that doesn't carry over to speaking.
Well, it took 8 yrs. of speech therapy before I could sound like I'm from Iowa and/or not an imitation of a deaf kid by some schlub on SNL.
1. Speaking a foreign language
2. Sexual preference
3. Your ears don't fucking work
One of these things is not like the others,
One of these things just doesn't belong,
In other news, the persecution of parents trying to preserve their subculture continues.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-11-01-georgia_x.htm
Hmm, Unfoggedetarian is probably right that I (and others) underestimate how problematic it is being gay in our society. I'm sure it depends a lot whether you happen to live in, say, Alabama or San Francisco.
Prosecutors said he used scissors to remove his daughter's clitoris in his family's Atlanta-area apartment in 2001.
Jesus frigging Christ. I gotta say, making your kid born deaf seems to me just as much child abuse as what this guy did.
The civilized thing to do would be to wait a few more years until he could have a daughter that was genetically engineered to be born without a clitoris.
Feel the culture baby.
OK, so then what is the defining characteristic or set of characteristics that separate choices we allow parents to make from those we don't? If it's harm (or exposure to harm), you really do have to explain why "gay" or "black" is not a harm, but "deaf" is.
If you can sue for it, it's a harm. If the doctor comes into the waiting room and says "Ms. X, as a result of poor postnatal care I'm afraid your child has red hair" you probably couldn't sue. If the child was deaf, you could. (Certainly premature infants who were blinded by pure oxygen therapy can and have). Loss of a limb, malformation, etc - all actionable. Black - tricky to imagine how that would happen. But say a black couple gave birth to an albino child and it was in some way the hospital's fault? Could they sue?
This is actually the area of my doctoral research, so I am somewhat reluctant to get involved [I know that sounds like a bastard thing to say, but, fuck it, I come to unfogged to read about other things!].
However, one quick comment about disabilities being relativized to environments, e.g. the claim that deafness is only a disability in a society without widespread sign language use. I'd be inclined to see that as a non-starter.
There's pretty much no potential disability -- including fairly extreme restrictions on mobility, cognition, and so on -- where we can't imagine some possible world in which people who possess that trait are not disadvantaged relative to those who lack it: worlds with Davros-style rocket powered levitating wheelchairs or perfect thought-to-speech translators, for example.
If we are assessing these kinds of counterfactually grounded claims * then we ought to be carrying out that assessment with respect to worlds pretty much the same as our own.
* e.g. if it were the case that potential person P possessed trait T in world W, in which ways would P be disadvantaged vis a vis (some set of values or other) compared to those who are not-T in world W**
** dumb/crude attempt to semi-formalise what I'm talking about
Thank natural selection for Scott, I thought I was the only disabled person reading this, and I'm not deaf.
Look, let's dispose of this nonsense first: I generally think we should leave these types of decisions to the parents. People generally want to do what is best for their kids.
Bollocks they do. When I was a kid it was still quite a common attitude for (rightly) proud working class parents to oppose their kids going to college because "I never went and it didn't do me any harm". And that's in the context of a sophisticated liberal society where aspiration was generally regarded as a good thing. A lot of parents simply want their kids to pose no threat to their prejudices, even if that means horribly mutilating them.
But the central point is that parents ought to be about enriching their children's experience, and deliberately denying them something that would tend to that enrichment is appalling. Of course you can be disabled and enjoy a good life: personally, I'm disgustingly rich by global standards, I enjoy my job, I've been happily married for 26 years, I've visited 16 countries on 4 continents, usw. But if I had full use of both arms and legs, I could have done a lot of other good stuff too. And if I had kids I would want them to have those extra opportunities, and if I didn't I'd be a badworse person.
The a*****y with speaking Irish in the home doesn't make it. People who speak Irish to their kids know damn well that they'll learn English outside. Children can learn several languages easily at a young age and, once again, it enriches their experience - a friend of mine sent his daughter to a school where they teach in three. Hearing children of deaf people learn sign language and English too - enrichment.
It isn't dissing the deaf community to object to this sort of practice. The deaf community is a valuable and varied one and I suppose the person who signs with their parents at home but speaks Albanian with their friends on the streets of Tirana might justifiably identify as part of it. It's about being anti-limitation. We're over the idea that girls don't go to school. It shackles the kids.
It's about being anti-limitation.
That nailed it. If you deliberately limit a kid you're doing it to assuage your own insecurities, not for some grand principle of cultural continuation.
I understand she's with child.
Wow. I send apo an e-mail, don't check the blog for half a day, and look what I find! Threads like this (and the child-porn-on-the-president's-computer one) are why I keep hanging around here.
In my e-mail to apo, I said, "If I were more judgmental I'd say it was pretty fucked up." Having read through all the amazing comments here, I'd have to agree that 323 pretty much encapsulated my thinking on the subject. At one level, I can *almost* understand why the parents in the NY Times story want to have similarly-challenged children, but understanding does not equal agreement. An analogy (bite me) with more interesting similarities than the gayness one explored upthread is that of parents with, say, IQ's of 100 de-selecting embryos through IVF with a strong likelihood of having IQ's far in excess of 100. In some imagined future, can't we envision genetic characteristics which predispose a child to having a higher-than-average IQ? And can't we imagine parents with normal IQs wanting children to whom they can relate and who will relate to them? And children who will more readily assimilate into society (and not get the crap beat out of them in school for being a brain), etc.?
Beyond the PGD aspect, no one has mentioned another intriguing part of the story -- that the couple who selected the embryo for having the deafness gene specifically withheld hearing aids from their mostly deaf child (I think Benton's character ended up doing this for his son on "ER"). Given the "ER" story arc, I got the impression that there is a school of thought out there that withholding hearing devices and teaching children ASL instead is somehow more desirable than cultivating what hearing ability those children may possess. Isn't this similar in some ways to withholding medical treatment for religious reasons? Or maybe it's closer to refusing to allow one's child to use prosthetic legs if they lose their limbs in an accident in order to allow them to force them to get around in a wheelchair?
327: I wonder if she pre-selected an embryo with the gayness gene. Or de-selected one with the authoritarian gene she (possibly) inherited from her father.
I suppose I'll read all about it in the Enquirer.
Oh, and apo: excellent post title.
330: I wondered how many people would get the reference.
Oh, we all got the reference. We just weren't gauche enough to mention it ....
331. Of course we recognized that apopros title. Do you think we're freaks?
(I saw that flick when I was teenager. It is hard to forget that last scene.)
toward the East
where dwells the inscrutable ttaM.
He sure doesn't make it easy to scrute him, spelling his name backwards and all. Him and Mr. nworB.
We learned everything we know from uhcnaM uF.
We should all do this from now on. It's fun.
Ignore the above post please.
!yalnita yapgi yani yabsdrawkcA
Or, of course, we could always comment
erom a s'ti dnatsrednu I .nodehpertsuob
efficient way of writing. (Credit to Standpipe, way
(.emitemos nehw kcab
This brings us closer to Raymond Queneau territory. (Sausagely is already there.)
All chant "Ou-li-po" as we march into the Wicked Witch's castle.
342 -- Against the Day has a character in it whose family name is Uckenfay. FYI.
Last night, after I stopped reading the thread, something occurred to me. Who is qualified to judge the relative merits of (a) being deaf in a Deaf community and (b) being hearing in a hearing community? I get the impression that having been a hearing person and becoming deaf doesn't make you likely to become (a), so this may be a situation of true incomparables.
Speaking as a mother of a gay kid who lives in a very gay-friendly town: It still isn't easy. Easier, certainly, than Redneck, Back-of-Nowhere, but not all chirpy birds and happy endings. Being gay severely limits one's pool of partners, raises one's risk of life-threatening disease, puts one at a disadvantage re: family-building, from everything to having kids to sharing rights and benefits that spouses get automatically. If I could wave a magic wand and make those dangers and disadvantages go away, I would. I can't imagine selecting for something that would put my child on a more challenging footing in the world as it is today.
Hell, as it is, I tell him he's lucky that he didn't inherit much of the crap that is in my DNA. Imagine a chef who couldn't even cook shellfish without having an allergy attack.
If one understands and doesn't disagree with the behavior of some of the deaf parents here, then what's wrong with female genital mutilation carried out in other places?
348 - I think this gets back to the distinction between actively harming and just selecting for disability, the latter of which is arguably not a harm any more than simply giving birth to a deaf child by chance. Though not everyone (including me) accepted that the latter was in fact harmless.
does it matter that it's only a selection? the parents aren't deliberately making deaf or dwarf embryos - they are making some large number of embryos and then screening them, and choosing one (or however many you need to implant to be sure that the process works). If they treated nondeaf/nondwarf embryos with some imaginary teratogen that only causes deafness/dwarfism, that would feel wrong. This doesn't feel precisely right, but they make a choice somehow - they don't implant all of the embryos.
I think this gets back to the distinction between actively harming and just selecting for disability
I'm having trouble making that distinction. Why is deliberately cutting an infant's arm off any different from deliberately picking the genetic material for a one-armed kid? Even if the idea is to fudge the probabilities it's still deliberate action with intent to disable.
317: The mother "did not discover it until more than a year later"??? I find that impossible to believe; there would have been bleeding and irritation, probably infection. Two-year-olds, even if not still in diapers, do not launder their own underwear.
There's a lot about that story I find a little suspicious.
347: Being gay ... raises one's risk of life-threatening disease
I'll assume that you really meant to say "being gay has historically been statistically correlated with unsafe behavior which raises one's risk of life-threatening disease," and not bite your head off here.
Davros-style
I heart ttaM.
321 doesn't work. Suppose that exposure to a particular virus at a young age increased your likelihood of becoming gay, and suppose further that someone knowingly exposed someone to that virus. When that person became gay you can be pretty sure they could sue and win.
354 also isn't right. Not just historically, but even now, and even if you engage in the same sex acts, a man is much more likely to get HIV having unprotected anal sex with a gay man than he is having unprotected anal sex with a straight woman. Them's the facts. There's no value judgement in those facts. Nor is there any claim that this is anything other than contingent on certain unfortunate historical accidents.
356: I don't think your point is as strong as you imagine. I'm not sure you could sue on the facts you've stated. But replace "knowingly" with "intentionally" and then it is a harm, and you could sue. The harm isn't necessarily *becoming gay* so much as the intentional violation of your bodily integrity. It's arguably civil battery. You could similarly sue if someone intentionally dumped hair dye on your head and turned you into a redhead. Yet no one is arguing that being redheaded is a disability.
357: Granted; take "unsafe behavior" in 354 to include "e.g. having unprotected anal sex with a gay man on Earth in the 21st century" rather than merely "e.g. having anal sex".
Unfortunately, some people still seem to believe that "Being Gay Gives You The AIDS".
You could similarly sue if someone intentionally dumped hair dye on your head and turned you into a redhead. Yet no one is arguing that being redheaded is a disability.
I think you are in agreement with 356, and that this is indeed the reason why the "if you can sue over it, it's a harm" line of argument in 321 is not entirely felicitous.
does it matter that it's only a selection? the parents aren't deliberately making deaf or dwarf embryos
No, they're not. However, they are deliberately making a deaf/etc baby. Isn't this the main thing?
354: Statistically, engaging in anal sex in a het relationship is significantly less dangerous than in a gay one; ergo, being gay [and engaging in sex; that's a given, obviously] increases the situational risk. As we all know, "safe" sex is merely "safer"; no barrier method is foolproof. I'm not saying that being gay = contracting AIDS; what I am saying is that the chance of being exposed is higher than for the average het male, hence the risk is greater, just as a het female is significantly more likely to suffer an unintended pregnancy than is a lesbian.
359: Unfortunately, some people still seem to believe that "Being Gay Gives You The AIDS".
It should be obvious that I'm not one of them. Note that my desire to wave a magic wand was not to make the Offspring not gay, but to make the downside go away. But, as I can't, and as I see how his life is affected by his orientation, especially in finding someone compatible to pair with, I'm unable to figure out why anyone would actively seek to marginalise a child, "sharing a culture" or not.
362: One of my points is that "being gay" is not the same as "engaging in anal sex with gay men whose infectious disease status is unknown."
364: Interestingly, I had a gut negative reaction to your first comment on this point. I just realized where the disconnect is; I'm bisexual, and consider bisexuality to be inherently more rewarding than monosexuality. I was subconsciously conflating the rewards of bisexuality with the rewards of queeritude in general.
I don't plan to reproduce, but if I did, I wouldn't select embryos for bisexuality (in the sense of discarding an embryo if it were sure to be monosexual). If I could prenatally wave a magic wand and guarantee that my hypothetical offspring was bisexual, I might very well do so. Some people might consider that monstrous.
To hell with the analogy ban: making my hypothetical kid bisexual is a bit like deaf parents installing an on/off switch for hearing into their kid.
361: No, they're not. However, they are deliberately making a deaf/etc baby.
But that baby doesn't have the option of not being deaf/a dwarf. His/her only option is to not have been born or be deaf/a dwarf.
365: One of my points is that "being gay" is not the same as "engaging in anal sex with gay men whose infectious disease status is unknown."
People lie about their status, people cheat in supposedly monogamous relationships, people just fuck up sometimes. "Being gay" pretty much means that the sex one has is going to be with another gay [or bi] man, and that it is more likely to have an anal component than, say, het sex with a woman. That equals increased risk. Pretending it doesn't is just denial.
People lie about their status, people cheat in supposedly monogamous relationships, people just fuck up sometimes. "Being gay" pretty much means that the sex one has is going to be with another gay [or bi] man, and that it is more likely to have an anal component than, say, het sex with a woman. That equals increased risk. Pretending it doesn't is just denial.
Many gay men do not engage in any anal sexual activity at all.
Fortunately, no one will notice if I engage in another analogy at this point in the thread: would it be fair to say "Being black raises one's risk of committing a felony?"
Don't be a complete ass; the willful obtuseness is bad enough. If you were more interested in grasping what I am actually saying than projecting your [what? wishful thinking? denial? bi-coolness?], you might have got my point.
Done.
I *am* grasping what you're saying. I'm sorry I angered you.