Logical failure and Political Correctness
Listening to the BBC News podcast for 2008 March 10, they have a fascinating debate between the host and a deaf parent, where the deaf parent, Tomato Licci (sp?) argues with real vigor and tremendous intellectual dishonesty, for his right to pay to have an IVF embryo that is deaf, versus requiring that IVF-created embryos of deaf parents be screened for deafness.
His key argument? Deafness is not a disability, since there is deaf culture, and he wants his children to be part of that culture.
The host responds quite nicely but logically that obviously it is a disability, since you cannot HEAR, while certainly a hearing person can learn to sign.
The parent just retreats to arguing about discrimination and the horror of calling the inability to hear a disability.
I would like to actually hear an argument about whether parents should be allowed to choose to have disabled embryos engineered for them, regardless of the disability. There are certainly those out there that would love to be able to choose to have a child that never became an adult. Is that right? Is that just? I don’t know the answer to that.
William Cross wrote:
What up, Seth-Dawg!
Look, deaf people do have a culture. And there’s only one way in: being deaf. If these parents want their kids to be a part of that culture, then so be it. After all, we don’t object to religious parents insisting on their kids getting a religious education and religious upbringing; they’re just raising their kids in their own culture.
Although it sounds odd when applied to something we categorize as a disability, deaf people really do have their own subculture, their own language that goes along with this subculture, and that’s fine. Deafness is fundamentally different in this regard than, say, congenital paraplegia, or sickle-cell anemia.
But they’re not simply screwing over society for their own personal mini-me ambitions. No, they’re actually helping maintain the diversity of our gene pool. Humans are a genetically small species. Consider, by contrast, dogs. There are labradors and great danes and poodles, and they can all interbreed. While these breeds exist because we humans have inbred them, this genetic diversity was nearly all present in their ancestors, the wolves; it just took some inbreeding to bring many of these traits to expression.
Now, unlike wolves or dogs, humans are like just one breed: think French Poodle. Sure, there are some black French Poodles and some white French Poodles, just as humans have a variety of skin tones, but that doesn’t matter. We’re all powerfully inbred, and that’s a dangerous place for a species to be.
Now, most genetic screening is going to act to reduce the number of people with certain traits in our gene pool. We’re acting to become even more inbred. I think it’s perfectly legitimate for deaf people to choose to have children like them, because in part, it maintains our genetic diversity.
Besides, this isn’t even an option for many couples. You’ve got to be pretty well off to pay for this type of genetic screening (I’m quite sure insurance companies don’t cover it). So you’re looking at a very small segment of the population.
All in all, trust me, this sort of thing isn’t worth getting worked up over. Focus your energy on things that matter: basically, a fucked up economic and political system that tolerates large scale poverty. Rich deaf people wanting their kids to be like them? Seriously, guy, it’s not a problem.
-Wil
Posted on 13-Mar-08 at 2:42 pm | Permalink
seth wrote:
I think you have fundamentally missed the point. If a child is raised in a religious household, they still have the choice when they leave that household to reject the teachings of their parents. Robbing a child of the chance to HEAR is a choice that they can never make for themselves later.
Just because someone has money to pay for something, does not mean they should have the choice to purchase it. There are prices to pay to have someone killed, but we agree that paying that price should exact another cost: prison. While deaf people are certainly born, and they have every right to live, engineering a fertilized egg and artificially causing it to lead to a pregnancy when none would otherwise occur, despite knowing that that egg would result in a pregnancy with a major disability, yet a different artificial egg would NOT have that disability, is a different topic entirely.
I find it humorous as well that you find circumcision barbaric, yet don’t see the parallel between cutting a part of a child off, and engineering your children to have no hearing. Both are parents making a specific choice to remove a physical piece of their child, not just “lifestyle” choices.
Posted on 14-Mar-08 at 7:23 pm | Permalink
William Cross wrote:
Sorry for the delay; I’ve been out.
No, I’ve not missed the point. I understand what you’re saying. But the bottom line is, I find it pointless to get worked up about a few rich people engineering their children to be a specific way. Trust me, if these kids grow up to resent their inability to hear, they can do a better job than you can for speaking on behalf of the unborn deaf.
Seriously, this is just not an issue.
As for circumcision, that’s got no bearing on this situation. Calm down, man.
-Wil
Posted on 27-Mar-08 at 9:13 am | Permalink