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Fast-forward six years. I am a graduate student who has brought my nine-month-old
daughter for a well-baby check-up at the university teaching hospital. My university does not
provide medical insurance as part of the graduate student funding package and I am one of
many brown mothers in the clinic, but the only deaf one. The medical student who initially
examines my daughter makes a comment. I miss it, and ask the student to repeat what she
has said. Upon my informing the medical student of my hearing loss, the tone of the entire
visit changes. My daughter’s medical exam is interrupted as the medical student shifts her
attention to me. I am given a lecture on birth control and how to avoid becoming pregnant
again, since we got lucky this time, but my next child might not be so lucky.
I am not only nonplussed, but struck by the irony of “hearing” this from a darkskinned
woman of color who has undoubtedly experienced her own share of discrimination
based on physical characteristics. I think about the kinds of things our children inherit from us.
The ability to discriminate subtle gradations of color. Things like the family academic lineage
and a people’s history of persecution that my child of Jewish heritage inherited from his father.
Things like a dimpled smile and a family history bound up with slavery and genocide that
my child of African and Native American heritage inherited from her father. Things like
compassion for people who have a different way of being in the world.
Before bearing my biological children, I thought about the prejudices they might
face—discrimination deeply rooted in historical fact, but also in the experiences of their
able-bodied fathers. I did not consider the cruelty of bringing a child into a world where she
or he would be highly likely to experience discrimination. I was not dissuaded by the taunts
I had experienced as a child myself for having a mother of Arab-American heritage.
But defying social discrimination is the province of good girls. Burdening innocent
children with disability—whether their own or that of their mother—is the mark of an
egregiously bad girl.
“How so?” I wonder.
Is there a threshold against which potential disabled mothers ought to measure
their desire to become biological mothers against the harm their children might experience?
And if there is such a threshold, are the harms of social discrimination related to disability
unique? Or are these just a piece of the harm-continuum we consider when bringing any
child into the world?
“But wait!” you interject. Social discrimination is different from physical disability!
True, that.
To have a body that doesn’t fit into a world designed for a narrow range of bodies
is frustrating. Dismaying, even. To have a body that experiences physical pain offers up a
different kind of calculus from the one I performed when deciding to be a biological mother.
Assuming that discrimination experienced by a deaf child (or any child of a deaf mother) is
sufficient to forego procreating is an act of medical prejudice. Leaping into biological motherhood,
not knowing whether your child will be deaf or hearing, not believing your disability
will harm your child, not knowing what the future will bring—well, this couldn’t possibly
be an act of love, could it?
This is how to render a deaf mother fierce.
Teresa Blankmeyer Burke, PhD, is a philosopher and bioethicist at Gallaudet University. Her research focuses
on bioethical issues of concern to the signing deaf community, in particular issues of genetics and reproduction.
In addition to her scholarly work, Dr. Burke serves as bioethics expert to the World Federation of the Deaf
and chairs the National Association of the Deaf Bioethics Task Force. She is currently writing a memoir
about her experience of being a widowed mother living in the wilderness of Wyoming.