A discussion vlog: Carl Schroeder explains how his Deaf friends almost lost their Deaf baby to our government in 1980s when baby hearing test became mandatory. Social workers who threatened to take away their baby were more concerned about the baby's residual hearing than they were about American Sign Language (ASL), the language the baby was born into. (The baby's parents and grandparents, both maternal and paternal, are Deaf.) The government didn't, and still doesn't, think ASL matters, especially when there is some residual hearing.
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8 comments:
Carl,
This deaf parent ought to file the legal suit against the county government for its systematic harassment and invasion of personal privacy from the "nanny" government.
That's why I never am for the EDHI testing at all. I rather see parents take the likings to the child without any kind of meddlesome testings to determine the future of deaf child.
Handful of federal lawmakers expressed their personal concerns about the so-called personal privacy issue withini the EDHI and other government-issued genetic tests for all newborn babies.
Not too late for this deaf parent to take up the legal suit against the county government and social worker for their illegal conducts of harassment and government imposition upon someone's parenting abilities, ex. mandatory assignment of that deaf kid's residual hearing to the mainstream school.
RLM
This illustrates the fact the U.S. has its own Gestapo policing over affairs of U.S. Citizens, hearing or not. Very covert they are because they do this in tiny bits.
Carl,
Please respond to this comment since I have been trying to work on a paper in which I am trying to show that society has a "one-db rule" in which they think if a Deaf kid has even 1 db of hearing (residual hearing), the kid therefore "belongs" to the Hearing world. This vlog sounds like a good example that I can use of the one-db rule in effect.
You said they wanted the kid mainstreamed. Were the parents also pressured to make sure the kid had hearing aids and get speech therapy also?
Yes, the parents were driven into the parent-infant program in which they were taught about amplification and speech pathology. They were completely clueless of both hearing aids and spoken language, and they began to think that they could put English on their hands (SEE). They were very confused about their child's being Deaf.
None of their Parent-Infant Program teachers was Deaf.
Thanks, Carl. That helps.
"Residual" actually means left over, remaining, what is still there after most is used up or gone. That makes no sense for a deaf or hard of hearing baby who never had full hearing to begin with.
That anecdote sounds like a combination of Deaf parents not wanting to develop their child's hearing for any use it can offer, and an overzealous social worker who thinks its a crime not to develop one's abilities to the best possible extent. I imagine taking the baby away didn't happen because other people involved had better sense and knowledge of the law.
But it CAN happen, and all parents need to see that their babies can learn to make full use of every sense they have. Even Deaf babies can extract some use of "residual" hearing. That's separate from a cultural orientation and doesn't affect it at all.
Carl,
I don't know how the Salex77 pic and profile got there in the first place. I used the Apple Mac computer at that time as someone must use the computer before me. I was not aware of it.
I see that this incident involved the mandatory hearing test took the place before the EDHI testing.
Which county/state required for newborn hearing test before the EDHI?
RLM
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