Thought experiments with new technologies, and especially new reproductive technologies, are grist for the bioethics mill. Few scenarios are more provocative than designer deaf children -- genetically engineering children so that they will join the deaf community.

This has been documented at least once. In 2002 the Washington Post Magazine interviewed a lesbian couple who had produced a partially deaf child by getting a deaf friend to provide sperm. They refused a hearing aid and raised the child as if he were totally deaf. He could make a decision about a hearing aid when he was older, they said. In the ensuring uproar, two opposing views emerged. Many deaf people believe that they are a linguistic minority, not people with a disability. Most hearing people believe that it is a disability.

Obviously deafness makes life more difficult for a child, even if he or she feels at ease in a deaf community. But some deaf couples respond that they have a right to exercise their reproductive options and that the wider community should respect the decisions that they make. As the Oxford utilitarian bioethicist Julian Savulescu wrote about this issue: “As rational people, we should all form our own ideas about what is the best life. But to know what is the good life and impose this on others is at best overconfidence, at worst, arrogance.”

Since deaf parents face difficulties in raising a hearing child, there has apparently been quite a bit of discussion in the deaf community about the merits of using pre-natal diagnosis (PND) and pre-natal genetic diagnosis (PGD) to have deaf children. To select a deaf child with PND, a couple has to abort a hearing child; with PGD, they only have to discard embryos.

A recent contribution to this debate comes in the latest issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics. A group of Australian researchers interviewed 66 hearing children of deaf parents to find out what they thought -- since they are at home in both worlds. They found that 77% were opposed to selecting children for either hearing or deafness. Like many others associated with the deaf community, they appear to oppose these technologies because they fear that they will eventually be used to eliminate deaf people. However, hearing children still regard the deaf community more as an expression of cultural diversity than a disability. ~ Journal of Medical Ethics, December