Thank to @[email protected]
The cochlear question : As the hearing parent of a deaf baby, I’m confronted with an agonising decision: should I give her an implant to help her hear?
by Abi Stephenson
I knew my daughter could hear: not just because she loved music, but because she had perfect rhythm. She punched her fists in the air like a human metronome, and brought a doughy heel to the ground precisely on each down beat. I had thrown off the yoke of milestone-tracking months earlier, having become fixated on her inability to roll during the precise developmental week for rolling. So when she didn’t form consonants at the prescribed time, I made a deliberate choice to ignore it. It didn’t occur to me that deafness might not be an either/or binary, and that certain vibrations and pitches – the down beat of a Wiggles song, say – could be apprehended, while other subtle speech sounds might be snatched out of a sentence. So it was a couple of months after her first birthday when we discovered our Botticellian baby had mild hearing loss, and two years after that when she lost almost all of her remaining hearing entirely.
There exists a zealous group in the deaf community that try to say implants are wrong. In the hearing community, some would call making this decision for another “ableist”.
Granted: nobody questions glasses for the near sighted.
I wear glassses, I can’t nearly fathom my life if my parents decided that I shouldn’t see because that’s “ableist”. I also have autism, if I didn’t go to a special needs school because of ablism I would be in a much worse position.
I don’t make up the news, I just report it.
Back to you in the studio Steve
Seems like there is a difference between able (as in, able to hear someone yelling at you not to accidentally walk into traffic) and ableist (reducing representation and accommodation for those where implants don’t work)
(I know this isn’t your fight)