This is taken from what I wrote on the Bionic Ear Blog post about her shock that Deaf parents would want deaf children. My favorite quasi-neoligism? "to share the bonds of human ties and circumstances." A google search for "ties and circumstances -filetype:pdf" reveal two pages of results, but 13,000 omitted.

Unfortunately, my English professor would have probably circled that peculiar phrase and ask me to clarify it because it's vague, clichéd and meaningless, but I simply cannot, in my quest for good writing, murder my darlings. Anyway, here's the comment:

I've talked with some of my friends, and they basically share the opinion that it is the majority who should be sensitive to the minority. I don't want to frame it in the sense that there is this white, male, straight, society that is oppressing the minority, but it's important to see things from the perspective of people who are not part of those in power.

I could talk about straight parents wanting straight children instead of gay children, but I should frame it instead in terms of a tradition that existed in ancient cultures and even now: a preference for having sons.

When China imposed a one-child policy, hundreds of thousands of parents killed their infant daughters because they want only boys. Sure, this act came from a sexist belief that only boys can accomplish important things, and girls cannot. But that mindset existed because girls were not allowed to work, own property, or do anything except be a wife, a mother, and a daughter. So they were seen as worthless for more than child-bearing.

Girls could also be said to have a harder life, because they are not seen growing up to be a leader, a scientist, an engineer, a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, or a president since they have a 'handicap' that men don't.

If you believe that women should not have to change themselves to join a male-centric world, that it is mainstream society that ought to adjust to women's style of management rather than exclude them, then why should mainstream society not adjust to the uniqueness that Deaf people could bring to society if they were given a chance and an open mind? And that uniqueness includes the freedom to appreciate a disability as a way to share the bonds of human ties and circumstances that other people could not?

Deafness is a disability hard to place, because it is unlike other disability. Even Helen Keller once said that between blindness and deafness, deafness is worse because while blindness cut her off from things, deafness cut her off from people. And yet, for those only deaf and born of deaf parents, they can find a greater union with others of the same caliber that isn't possible outside of it.

That's my 2 cents, and I don't have a conclusion.