Sound and fury
Thousands of deaf kids can hear, and speak, thanks to a stunningly effective ear implant. So why is the deaf community in an uproar?

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By Arthur Allen

May 25, 2000 | Jacob Maryo, a deaf 3-year-old, runs to the window when he hears the trains rattle past his Cincinnati house. Six months after his cochlear implant, he can also hear music, and the phone ringing, and his dad speaking, even with the TV on. "Yep, he's fixed," Jacob's audiologist said during his last visit.

But when Jacob's dad, Mike Maryo, went online to share that happy experience with other deaf people, the response was surprising: They hated the implant, and they hated him.

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The cochlear implant, introduced two decades ago but only now reliable enough for widespread use, is a surgically implanted device that transmits sound over a wire to the auditory nerves. More than 20,000 deaf Americans have gotten the implant, and the numbers are growing fast. The surgery is especially popular among the 90 percent of deaf children who have hearing parents -- parents who want to talk to their children, and want their children to talk to the greater world. Babies as young as 9 months old are getting cochlear implants. And this has created a deep fissure in the identity-conscious deaf community.

For many deaf people, the "fixing" of the deaf by the hearing is a form of baby-snatching. Their sense of betrayal is like the betrayal some African-Americans feel about white couples adopting black kids. For years, a deaf educational system and culture have grown up around the use of American Sign Language, and many deaf people see themselves as a "linguistic minority" rather than a disabled group. For this group, whose leading spokesman is the (non-deaf) writer Harlan Lane, a deaf child will always be deaf and should not be stripped of his or her cultural birthright by a misplaced effort at mainstreaming.

"Members of this cultural and linguistic minority have hearing parents who do not transmit and will not share the linguistic and cultural identity of their deaf children," Lane, a psychiatrist at Northeastern University, wrote in his 1992 book, "The Mask of Benevolence." "The children themselves are too young to refuse treatment or to dispute the infirmity model of their difference."

The implant resembles a hearing aid, with one wire carrying a set of electrodes deep into the cochlea, a snail-shaped part of the inner ear. Another wire is linked to a processor, worn on the child's belt like a Walkman, while a third wire is attached to a quarter-sized transmitter attached to the electrodes, through the skull, with a magnet. It looks like a bottlecap behind the child's ear.

At online deaf chat areas, deaf people describe the implants with dark references to genocide and eugenics -- in language that reflects their own distance from mainstream grammar. "Why do we want to have our kid's skull opened?" asks one deaf man. "People are treating kids like having the skull opened and shut which it is not the hood of a car!"

"Cochlear implants hurt deaf communities possible to destroy our deaf culture[sic]," writes another. "I don't understand why the doctors steal deaf children from their true identity." The implants are merely "another way for audists to keep control of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing clients. ... the cash register is ringing every time a Deaf person shows up at the hospital."

Mike Maryo's post about Jacob's miraculous progress met with bitterness and hostility. "Doesn't that sum up the awful attitude people have about hearing loss?" one opponent of implants wrote. "And goes to prove all along what Deaf people have been saying -- the cochlear implant is used as a tool to FIX deaf people. Happily for us, and sadly for others -- it doesn't!!!"

In other words, critics of cochlear implants are as leery of the success of the device as they are of its failure.

"They're afraid that if all the children get implants, you're going to wipe out deaf culture," says John McCelland, 47, a deeply hard of hearing man who received an implant five years ago and got immediate benefits.

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