Ethics, Deafness, and New Medical Technologies

In the last 50 years, several new technologies have become enormously important within the Deaf community and have helped significantly to improve deaf people’s lives in a hearing world. Current public attention and admiration, however, seems unduly focused on medical technologies that promise to solve ‘‘the problem’ ’ of being deaf. One reason for this interest, we argue, is the public’s preoccupation with deafness as a disability and promises that technological breakthroughs such as the cochlear implant will ‘‘cure’’ deafness. Pressure on parents to make quick and early decisions and lack of adequate information about alternatives often leave them unprepared for the consequences of these decisions. To allow deaf individuals and their families to make better informed decisions about their lives and their futures, we argue finally that professionals who interact with these families adopt inclusive and individualizing ethics. New technologies such as captioning, the acoustic coupler, the Internet, and instant messaging have improved communication between deaf and hearing people and have contributed to the quality of deaf people’s lives. However, media attention and public awareness are largely focused on new medical technol-ogies that hold the potential of altering the condition of being deaf or hard of hearing. Two such technologies are the cochlear implant and genetic engineering. According to Marschark (2001), an examination of the research agendas of funding agencies in the United States over the last 20 years indicates a change in funding priorities. For example, when comparing th