(Aeon) – As a hearing parent of a deaf baby, I’m confronted with an agonising decision: should I give her an implant to help her hear?

In a recent interview with the news site Truthout, the Deaf philosopher Teresa Blankmeyer Burke argues that the language of tragic loss seems particularly ill-fitting for a deaf child: ‘Some of us do not share this experience [of loss] at all, but only know what it is to be in our bodies as they have always existed.’ News headlines about childhood deafness and hearing technology often slip into the ‘from deaf tragedy to hearing miracle’ narrative, missing this crucial point about self-concept entirely. For many parents, this has intuitive clarity too. Absolutely smitten with my baby’s many tiny perfections, I had a stubborn sense that her deafness was not a pit she had fallen into, but just one of many extraordinary discoveries about her that I was making every day. (Read More)