Click on any question to read the answer.
What is your opinion of cochlear implants? Many doctors are calling it
a "revolutionary technology" that is transforming what had been an
isolated group of people, namely the deaf. How do you see the
development in implants?
Do you feel that the mass media has given the CI controversy fair and
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eliminate deafness?
What bothers you most about implants?
What are some of your concerns about children with CIs?
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How much person-to person contact have you had with deaf people with
implants?
Do you consider people with CIs part of the Deaf Community?
Aren’t most people with CIs happy about their implants?
Do you have questions about the effectiveness and safety of implants?
Well, they can give implantees antibiotics, right?
If the CI is here to stay, isn’t it a waste of time and energy to
try and fight it?
Those who are in favor of cochlear implants say that implants can make
deaf children and adults hear. But Deaf advocates say that even with an
implant, a deaf person is still deaf. What does that mean?
Even so, doesn’t the CI have the power to bring an isolated,
marginalized group of people into the mainstream of society?
Aren’t implants a good thing for society?
Why are some deaf people so bitterly opposed to implants?
Why do you object to giving implants to deaf children?
Isn’t some hearing better than nothing? Isn’t artificial
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Aren’t a number of born-deaf or early-deafened children getting
remarkable, even miraculous, results from their implants?
Won’t the implant prevent illiteracy in deaf children?
If the Deaf community is losing the war against childhood CIs, what are
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Are CIs improving public attitudes towards deaf people?
What’s the real motivation of those who oppose childhood implants?
Do Deaf people oppose CIs because they need to recruit deaf children to
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What’s been happening with the CI controversy on DeafNotes?
Who are these implant evangelists, anyway?
Illicit promotion? How?
But aren’t the implant corporations interested in reaching out to
your largely deaf readership?
But don’t kids with implants make miraculous progress?
If deaf children can benefit from a CI, why deny them the opportunity?
Why consign them to a childhood of silence?
Aren’t parents who decide to give their deaf kids implants giving
them more communication choices, instead of limiting them to signing
alone?
Are implants a form of child abuse? That’s what Deaf Culturalists
claim. What’s your view?
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How is ASL going to survive the CI onslaught?
Do kids with cochlear implants identify as deaf or hearing?
Will the Deaf community survive the cochlear implant? Won’t
implants ultimately render it obsolete?
Will the implant destroy Deaf culture?
What’s so special about Deaf Culture? Why should it be studied by
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Many of us are extremely skeptical about the claims we’ve been
reading in the media and cochlear-implant (CI) promotional literature.
We sometimes suspect that the media plays up the advantages of the CI
while dismissing the disadvantages. We have no quarrel with deaf
teenagers or adults who choose to receive implants. We have profound
reservations about the current trend of implanting deaf infants and
children.
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journalists that reveals prejudice: e.g., describing the CI as "a cure
for deafness" and the sensory experience of the unimplanted child as "a
world of total silence."
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coverage of this issue, you often see the doctor making some typically
authoritative comment like "We get much better results with implants
when the children are young. The earlier it’s done, the better the
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media visibility?
The media loves parents of kids with implants. They certainly get a
izable chunk of the spotlight. It’s hard to resist the sight of
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the spotlight.
Another thing: in articles about newly-implanted deaf children, you
always read what the adults (the doctors, audiologists, and parents)
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enemies of progress, as extremists, fanatics, and militants. Their
concerns are frequently downplayed or dismissed. An anti-implant
protest rally in Canada (1995) made it into Chuck Shepard’s "News
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Spring 2000, titled "Sound and Fury" and subtitled "Thousands of deaf
kids can hear, and speak, thanks to a stunningly effective ear implant.
So why is the deaf community in an uproar?" To quote one of the
tatements: "Many leaders of the National Association of the Deaf have
gotten implants, and the group is redrafting a position paper to make
it more friendly to cochlear implants." We were aware that NAD was
redrafting its old CI position paper, but who were these NAD leaders
who had received implants? Nancy J. Bloch, NAD Executive Director, told
us, "I don’t know where Arthur [Allen] got the ‘many
leaders’ and ‘more friendly to cochlear implants’ part,
committee is in the process of developing a new position statement for
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for emphasis on visual language development, among other things."
It’s safe to say that no NAD leaders have received implants.
And "stunningly effective?" Really?
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of bitter feelings. There has been some public outcry. A number of
implanted kids have entered the schools for the deaf. How well has it
been working out for them? Are they making good progress? Deaf children
have been known to haze implanted kids mercilessly. Parents of
implanted kids have been publicly confronted and excoriated by Deaf
people. There has been name-calling, shouting, and a lot of online
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Insulted, perhaps, but perhaps a more accurate response is "disturbed."
We’re gravely concerned about the effect that the implants will
have on these children’s educational careers, their social lives,
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before making the commitment.
Deaf people, quite understandably, feel threatened by the implant in a
way that they don’t feel threatened by other technological
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Hearing aids, let it be remembered, are completely removable. An
implant is a permanent installation. The new implants are used with
babies, and the community "feels that they’re being robbed of
their most precious resource–deaf children." (We’re
paraphrasing a statement we recently read.) The implant takes away more
than it gives.
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the closet, get some recognition and respect for it in the academic
community and general society, along comes the implant and a new boom
in the most rigorous kind of oral/aural approach. Some of us don’t
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Several factors.
We are gravely concerned about implants becoming a "trend." Remember
when tonsillectomies were the medical trend? If your child got sick and
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the trend died out.
One mother of two grown deaf children has compared cochlear implants to
ilicone breast implants, which the FDA assured us were quite safe, and
were part of a cosmetic trend–until word got out that there were
might be some very bad consequences.
Some of us see implants as the latest medical fad for "curing"
deafness. There is already a backlash of youthful implantees who are,
for various reasons, unhappy with their implants and have stopped using
them. A few have even had them surgically removed. It’s too soon
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they’ll be deprived of this tremendous source of enrichment.
The implant industry has a ready sucker market in parents of
newly-diagnosed deaf babies. They’re in a state of shock. They may
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their ads. Who could resist such a come-on?
There’s a growing trend to send newborns straight to the implant
clinic after the hearing-screening tests confirm that they’re
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Wham! The kid’s "fixed."
We’re worried about the way the cochlear-implant corporations have
been promoting implants as a providing a magic key to a deaf
child’s success in the mainstream, and the misleading advertising
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incomplete, even deceptive, picture to parents. They tout the "higher
quality of life" supposedly enjoyed by young implantees, as compared
with unimplanted deaf children. The implant industry, as far as we can
tell, has no real interest in the total well-being of these children,
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people), but to serve hearing parents. No CI surgeons or
representatives from the implant industry have, to our knowledge, ever
bothered to visit schools for the deaf or mainstream programs to see
just how well the consumers of their prostheses are doing in their
everyday lives. The implant industry has never sponsored any Deaf
Culture or ASL-affirmative events. They do send representatives to Deaf
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any community initiative that isn’t strictly self-serving.
We’re worried about the way implants are marketed to parents of
newly-diagnosed deaf babies. Now, ostensibly, statewide screening
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Question: Do parents of deaf babies really understand the options
before they commit to an implant?
Question: Are implants really a more cost-effective measure in the long
run than a sign-based education at a school for the deaf?
Question: Do parents whose children get implants have higher
expectations for them than parents who don’t?
Question: What long-term effects do the implants have on a deaf child,
ocially and academically?
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magazines, for example) carry glowing, simplistic stories about the
"miracle" of the implant ("the gift of sound!"), without discussing the
children whose experience with implants has been less than
"miraculous." When they tout a certain child making exemplary progress
with the implants, are they including full details of the child’s
communication capabilities before he got the implant? In some cases,
they omit this data. Some of this success is undoubtedly due to active
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extracurricular practice in reading and writing. We would like to know
what effect implants have on these vital skills.
Many of us in the Deaf community are likewise concerned about these
things. The high cost of the implant, the fact that there is still no
reliable way of predicting how much the implant will benefit a child or
what its long-term effect on her life may be, the attitude of some
doctors and implant-clinic staffers who prohibit any use of signing in
the rehabilitative regimen, parents who refuse to allow their child to
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political clout of the CI lobby, our response has been scattershot.
There is no single unified anti-childhood-implant organization.
We are concerned about the way the implant is being promoted as a "cure
for deafness." Calling the implant a "cure" is a fallacy. The implant
does not cure deafness. From what we understand (and we have discussed
this at length with people who have chosen implants for themselves), it
is plain wrong to describe an implant as a "miracle" or "cure." In most
cases, profound sensorineural deafness is not a "curable" condition.
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bionically undo this. There seems to be widespread misunderstanding
about just what an implant can do and what it cannot do.
What it does is to enable the user to perceive sounds and distinguish
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doesn’t make a deaf person hearing, but more like hard-of-hearing.
While some implantees are able to carry on regular voice conversations
on the telephone, others cannot. The outcome is quite unpredictable.
Just what is the quality of sound the implantees perceive? One
audiologist was quoted in a Sacramento Bee article (2001) as saying
that with an implant, 22 electrodes were "doing the work of 30,000 hair
cells." The 22 or 24 electrodes in an implant can’t possibly
replace the thousands of microscopic hair cells in the cochlea that
give richness and depth to sounds as they are perceived in normal
hearing. One cochlear-implant usr likens the sounds he heard in his
implant as "environmental noise." Perceiving "environmental noise" is
not equivalent to hearing the full spectrum of sounds.
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the acquisition of "normal" speech. How many hundreds, even thousands,
of hours does a deaf child with an implant spend in speech and auditory
therapy? Much of this time could be more profitably devoted to getting
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Members of the CI lobby want parents to believe that in choosing an
implant for their children, they’re giving them a magic key to
entry into a world without limitations. This, too, is propaganda. The
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At an educational conference in North Carolina, we met several deaf
children with implants, and none of them could communicate with us. And
ince this was an inclusive conference, the kids could see Deaf adults,
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At another conference a few years ago, we met a deaf woman who had
chosen an implant for herself, and we had a good talk. She told us that
he didn’t believe that implants were right for deaf children,
that it should be a matter of informed choice, that implants
didn’t make a deaf person hearing. A number of deaf people with
implants are fluent signers, and didn’t sever their connections to
the Deaf community after getting one. (Getting flak from Deaf
anti-implant advocates is another matter entirely.) Choosing an implant
is a decision they’ve made for themselves because they want to
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Certainly . . . if they want to be. We are amply aware that some
oral-deaf persons, with or without implants, reject any idea of
affiliation with this community. They identify solely with the Hearing
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oral interpreters when they’re needed). And for most people with
cochlear implants (most of whom, as far as we can tell, have achieved
more modest gains than the spectacular ones enjoyed by Sigrid Cerf!),
these concerns haven’t been eliminated. You would have to talk to
the people with implants to get their views. Some are oralists; some
are signers; some are eclectics. There’s a wide spectrum of
experiences and a diversity of views. All deserve representation.
We are quite aware that some implant users love their implants, enjoy
what the implants do for them, and would never consider having them
removed. Some, who have received implants as children, are glad their
parents made that decision for them. Others aren’t. A good number
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developments with interest. We’re aware that the 24-channel
implant is much less obtrusive-looking than the previous models, and
mall enough to be used in infants.
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"problem" of being profoundly deaf. As is fairly well known, the
installation of a CI destroys whatever residual hearing the implantee
might have. During CI surgery, a narrow tube containing the array of
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far as we can tell, has a totally unpredictable outcome.
The FDA approved cochlear implants for adults in 1985, and for children
over 18 months of age in 1990, and has subsequently lowered the age to
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that the FDA proceeded recklessly, bowing to the interests of a wealthy
industry. The long-term effects of the implants are still unknown, and
there is some fear that we may have another "Meme" scenario in the
not-too-distant future. Sure, they say, the FDA insists that cochlear
implants are safe. Wasn’t this exactly what they were saying about
ilicone breast implants not so long ago?
Lately, we’ve learned that some CIs manufactured in the U.S. may
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adults. An Associated Press report dated July 25, 2002 notes that
thirteen implantees in the U.S. have come down with meningitis,
including two deaf preschoolers who died. According to this report,
even implantees in other countries have also died from meningitis, and
these cases are being investigated by U.S. health authorities. Doctors
have been asked to report "any suspicious meningitis cases" to the FDA,
to "aggressively treat ear infections" in implantees, and make sure
children are properly vaccinated against meningitis.
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ome parents who say they weren’t sufficiently informed of the
Deaf Community’s attitude towards implants and that if they had
known beforehand, would not have committed themselves to giving their
child an implant.
We are not fighting against the implant. We support the right of deaf
people to make informed choices for themselves.
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that has been lost or damaged.
When we say that a person with an implant is still deaf, we mean that
it doesn’t nullify one’s being deaf. It doesn’t reverse
deafness. It mechanically provides sound stimulation, but it
doesn’t make a deaf person hearing. Disconnect the implant, and
the user is audiologically deaf again.
A deaf child with an implant is still going to be treated by others as
deaf, not hearing. They still need speech therapy, rehabilitation,
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ector will undoubtedly need oral interpreters. Society doesn’t
ee implanted people as "ex-deaf," but as "still deaf."
What do you mean by "isolation"? To us, an isolated deaf person is
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ee it as having more of a negative effect.
For those who have lost their hearing, implants are undoubtedly "a good
thing for society." If we became blind, we would want our eyes replaced
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experience as a sighted person, so we know what vision means, and what
we’d be losing. Those who consciously choose to accept an implant
understand that there are no guarantees, acknowledge the risks
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you."
The proponents of implants want the deaf person to bear the full burden
of the responsibility for communication, the burden of conforming to
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will probably not understand the cultural view of ASL.
Entirely aside from that is the expense factor. Implants usually cost
omething like $50,000 a pop, and we don’t think that figure even
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covered by health insurance? And one of the lines of reasoning used by
these advocates is that the implant is, in the long run,
cost-effective. It’s cheaper than the ultimate expense of sending
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Culturally-Deaf people have moral qualms about helping to pay for
omeone else’s implant, especially when that someone else is a
deaf child. They also have qualms about the implant industry’s
making money off deaf people’s deafness. As far as we know, no
deaf people occupy high positions in these corporations or clinics.
Few, if any, deaf people are directly benefiting from the implant
windfall. The implant industry is profiting directly from deaf
children’s deafness–and what is it doing to improve the
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this, and you’re bound to get a vehement answer.
We don’t feel that cochlear implants are good for born-deaf
children. Why? It confuses them. It aggravates sensory confusion.
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comprehend sounds any more than you can force a blind child to see
colors. The sounds they’re getting from the implant are not
natural sounds, they’re electronic sounds. Even if they’re
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electronic stimulation can be a "miraculous" substitute for natural
hearing. Well, you may note, so the 24-channel implant enables a wider
and more natural range of sounds to be decoded than was possible with
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One thing that we’d like to emphasize, and which we feel is
getting overlooked in this cochlear-implant slugfest, is the crucial
importance of teaching deaf children how to read and write.
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important issue is getting trampled and buried beneath the stampede of
cochlear-implant controversy. Proponents of cochlear implants claim
that kids with implants are able to receive information aurally, as
hearing kids effortlessly do . . . but are they really getting all the
information? Aren’t they missing something? Is the implant really
the "miracle fix" for deaf illiteracy? For decades, hearing aids were
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This intensive aural-rehabilitation regimen that’s part of the
childhood-cochlear-implant package–is this really going to help
their literacy?
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peech therapy does it take?) Without a solid foundation in literacy,
how can a person develop good speech and listening skills? This implant
brouhaha (give deaf kids bionic hearing so they can have better
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ight of the priorities.
And this is one thing that worries us: that children with implants are
being categorically excluded from the advantages of visual language and
visual learning. The implant has unleashed a new assault against ASL
and sign-based education. This is definitely not a good thing.
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the top of our priorities. Deaf children should learn how to read and
write first. They need this far more than they need implants. Reading
and writing are far more important skills than speaking and listening.
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an education–not adequate, let alone equal. Now we have an influx
of deaf kids with implants coming into the public schools, the schools
for the deaf, and the new oral schools. One Deaf superintendent told me
(off the record) that there were several deaf kids with implants in his
chool, and all of them had language delays.
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ruthlessly powerful and influential faction, as our critics argue, why
weren’t they able to prevent the FDA from approving implants for
deaf babies?) Imagine what schools and programs serving deaf children,
teens, and adults could do with the money that’s being spent on
childhood cochlear implants–$50,000 apiece! Federal monies spent
by the National Institutes of Health to study language acquisition in
youthful implantees could be more profitably used to improve deaf
children’s literacy skills.
We fail to see how the implant boom is improving public attitudes
towards deaf people or ASL or the Deaf community at all. Indeed, we see
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children into mainstream public-school programs, and to "fix the
problem" with implants. When oral/aural and sign-language programs are
competing for governmental funding, which one is going to get it?
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This is something that neither the medical/audiological lobby nor the
implant industry recognize. (But why should they? When deaf children
become ASL users instead of consumers of expensive audiometrics, it
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Our company runs a bulletin-board Website called DeafNotes, which has a
forum on cochlear implants. It has been the most frequently-posted and
hotly-debated of all the topics on that site since it was launched in
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debates. The debate quickly began getting acrimonious, with parents who
have chosen to give their deaf children implants posting threads like
"Cochlear Implant Success Stories," and verbally slugging it out with
Deaf people who feel that implants for deaf children are a form of
child abuse. It has been a real headache for the moderators and us.
We recall how it started. When a woman who had chosen to give her young
deaf son an implant entered the debate, it had an explosive effect. We
had to delete a batch of postings because the dialogue had degenerated
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progress is miraculous and want to tell the world about it; a few of
them have been actively and aggressively promoting implants. We call
them the "implant evangelists."
A relatively small number of parents of deaf children with implants.
There are a few of them who are notoriously aggressive and belligerent
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regularly interviewed by hearing-media reporters. They see themselves
as ambassadors for the cause of implanting deaf kids. They have two
faces: the mask of the loving, concerned parent (which they show to the
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be as extreme in their rhetoric as any diehard oralist. But we’ve
have the worst trouble with the implant evangelists. We had to ban a
few of them because they repeatedly broke the rules–they showed
discourtesy to others, insulted opponents, used sarcasm and profanity,
and engaged in illicit promotion of commercial cochlear-implant sites.
They interfered with other participants’ enjoyment of the site,
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What they were doing–or trying hard as hell to do–was
providing free advertising for the cochlear-implant
industry–posting messages with links to corporate and promotional
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is not allowed. This prohibition has been routinely violated by the
implant evangelists. When we removed their offensive posts, they
creamed and cussed at us. A few of them sent us obscene E-mails. They
called us Nazis. They accused us of censoring their free speech by
uppressing their news about the miraculous progress their implanted
kids have been making. In reality, we banned them because of their
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an interview with Sigrid Cerf, we contacted the company that
manufactured the implant she uses, and invited them to advertise in
DEAF LIFE. We received no response. Neither did we get a response from
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LIFE or a banner-ad in any of our Websites. And yet, when we removed
posts with promotional links, the implant evangelists cried foul.
That’s what the CI lobby and the implant evangelists would like
the public to believe. We’re more apt to read about the "miracle
tories" of deaf kids with implants because their parents have been
actively publicizing and promoting implants, with the aid of the
implant industry, which has one of the slickest propaganda campaigns
we’ve ever seen. Kids who start signing at an early age (i.e.,
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testimonial by a happy mother about the joys of having a deaf child
with an implant: "our miracle child." But do you ever see an article
about the delights of parenting an ASL-using child? My proposal:
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We find it morally questionable, the way some of these parents parade
their implanted children around to the media, show them off to
legislators, have them testify before Congress . . . More funding for
cochlear-implant programs, please, and as long as you’re at it,
you can cut the budgets of those sign-language programs. We certainly
don’t need them.
Some of these implant evangelists exercise a form of denial. They claim
that their children were born hearing, then became deaf, so by giving
them implants, they’re restoring their children’s original
hearing. Can they prove their children were born hearing? Can they
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don’t need a CI to derive this benefit.
Many parents who give their kids implants want them to use the
oral/aural mode exclusively–no signing allowed. Parents who make
the decision to give their children implants often say things like, "We
wanted to give our child a choice. If Jimmy wants to learn sign
language later and be deaf and switch off the implant, that’s fine
with us." But how is Jimmy going to make a choice when he has no daily
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That puts a psychological burden on the child.
The extreme culturally-Deaf view is that cochlear implants are a form
of child abuse, even genocide–accusations that anger parents and,
moreover, would be exceptionally difficult to prove in court. We can
understand why Deaf people feel this way, why they feel that implants
represent the latest of several organized attempts to wipe out Deaf
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we’d wager that they too have their secret signing groups. And in
the newly-opened schools for deaf children with implants, we
wouldn’t be at all surprised if the kids found a way to sign in
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their own. We are concerned about the emotional and cognitive
well-being of these young implantees in mainstreamed or strict-oral
environments. Some of them, of course, are receiving exposure to ASL.
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To them, being deaf is normal. They want to be accepted as they are.
What sort of self-identity will these implanted kids have? Will they
consider themselves deaf or hearing? A question: What’s special
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they reach their teens or college age. If this is so, we anticipate
that a large number of implantees will do likewise.
No matter how assiduously their parents, clinicians, medical
professionals, and the implant industry try to make the Deaf community
irrelevant and invisible, we believe that many of these deaf kids with
implants will ultimately choose to connect with our community. The
reason is fairly simple: deaf people like to be with other deaf people,
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perceptions and feelings. One of our challenges is to extend a warm
welcome to deaf people with implants. We cannot afford to reject any
deaf person simply because s/he has a CI. The Deaf community, like any
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attitudinal disability. Some of the comments we’ve read from
implant evangelists and journalists are proof that the cochlear-implant
trend has not improved public attitudes towards deaf people. Indeed, it
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This site is to be considered "in progress." We solicit input from deaf
people who have firsthand experience with implants, negative and
positive. We welcome your participation.