Rights as if Humans Mattered

When I tell people that I wrote a second book to prevent children from growing up without language, people always looked shocked that such a thing could happen. I always have to explain that 92% of deaf babies are born to hearing parents who don't usually think of language as the problem. Their doctors, educators and other "experts" also don't see language as the main issue facing a deaf baby in a hearing family. Many times the parents are explicitly told NOT to sign as that interferes with speech and hearing (even if there is none!). Thus, there are a few deaf babies who grow up without a clue what a shared language - a named language like English, Spanish or American Sign Language- is or how it connects us all. They are left out of any human community.

And the reaction to the above? Shock and disbelief. Normal hearing people see the human right of all deaf babies to have language. If a baby is visual, a visual language - a signed language makes sense.

So what's the problem?

Normal people are not the doctors, educators, audiologists and the A. G. Bell people advising new parents. These self proclaimed experts are blind to the very human, very beautiful and more than adequate visual lives of Deaf people and their rich, sophisticated signed languages, like American Sign Language or Japanese Sign Language. They as do all hearing parents of deaf babies need to learn about basic human rights: ALL BABIES NEED LANGUAGE.

The solution is already in place in Scandanavia : bilingualism. First get language to babies. If the baby is visual, use a visual language: Swedish or Finnish or Danish Sign Language. Then the spoken language of the parents and community. And why does it exist in one part of the world and no where else? Those countries ask the right question: What does a human baby need? Language is on the list, and the baby gets language through whatever medium is easiest (eyes instead of ears for deaf babies - how revolutionary!).

In the United States and most of the world, the wrong question gets the wrong answers: What's wrong with this baby?
Doctors and parents answer: "Broken ears." The next ten or twenty years are spent fixing non-working ears and the human baby is forgotten as a person.

Let's take languagelessness out of the closet. Take prelingual deafness out of educators hands, out of medicince, and put this language issue where it belongs: the human rights arena.