Some time ago, my Sister suffered a serious condiction to her life; she went totally deaf.
It wasn't a sudden event, not exactly. Her hearing had been going for a long time, getting worse and worse, and then one day, she woke up completely deaf. Unable to hear anything. I didn't live near her, but I did my best to help her, by writing and telling her how her life wasn't going to end, that there was wonderful new technology out there that would help, like the Cochlear Implant. A little while later, I was able to go visit her, and I taught myself some Sign Language so that I could talk to her (I confess, once I stopped learning it, I tended to forget it, and ended up having to resort to notes and things again). She taught me a great deal of things as well, things she learned from her own Sign Language classes both she and her husband were taking. I am very happy to say that she did indeed get the Cochlear Implant, and now she can hear again, can talk to her loved ones, can even listen to music!
Through her, I learned a lot about how people view the deaf. And there's a huge group of people out there who feel that a deaf person (who has been deaf from birth, or became deaf at a very young age) should not have the operation to have the Cochlear Implant. They feel (for right or for wrong), that looking at their deafness as a problem is wrong, and that you're not broken, so why should you be fixed? There is a rich deaf culture out there, and to some of them, having this operation is like a betrayal.
As a person who has been able to hear all my life, I can't imagine someone not wanting that for their children, if it's available. I can hear music, birds chirping, and other sounds that, to me, are vital to my well being. I cannot argue for their side, as I have not stood there.
However, I have recently read something that puts an interesting view on all of this.
Glow Magazine, Canada's Beauty and Health Magazine is a magazine I read a lot, simply for the reason that I like the fact that you can buy all the things you see in there in Canada. No more contests you can't enter, no more items you can't buy.
And I came across a article called Baby Talk, by Karen Robock. And in it, they have discovered that babies can talk to you, using simple sign language, long before they are able to speak in words. They are discovering that you can ask your baby what's wrong, if she wants her diaper changed, if she's hungry, gassy, you name it. Some research has shown that babies can learn simple sign language as early as four to six months of age. There is evidance that not only do these babies learn to speak vocally earlier, but that they have a more extensive vocabulary of signed and spoken words. One woman says she remembers her son, sitting up in bed at the age of 11 months, and telling her he had had a nightmare about a stinging bumblebee. Can you imagine how easy it is then, for a mother to comfort and soothe her child? Another mother reports that at 6 months, her little girl is happily signing I love you to family members.
Maybe there is something inside us that allows for recognistion of sign language as a more primal mode of communication. It's felt that our earliest ancestors couldn't make a lot of the vowel sounds, so they would have used a primitive sign language to get their point across. So maybe deaf people shouldn't feel that others see them as broken, but rather firstborn in the language of man.