Making peace with a threat to 'deaf culture'
By: Judy Foreman
From: Boston Globe, August 28, 2001

Jamie Weinstein-Delahunt, a deaf toddler from Jamaica Plain, is a born
communicator and a symbol of the profound changes now sweeping the world of
the deaf.  

Hands flying, the 2 1/2-year-old can communicate in American Sign Language,
or ASL. But she is also learning to hear and speak standard English, thanks
to a controversial device called a cochlear implant that surgeons put in her
ear nearly a year ago.  

Before long, Jamie and other deaf children who can both speak and sign may
accomplish what many of their elders could or would not: Straddle the
fiercely separate worlds of people who talk with their voices and those who
talk with their hands. 

Until a year or so ago, the idea of "fixing" deafness in a child like Jamie
was anathema to many proud members of Deaf (they spell it with a capital "D")
culture, who feel that deafness is not a disability and that any attempt to
remedy it is tantamount to "ethnocide" - the elimination of deaf people and
their minority culture and language. 

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/240/science/Making_peace_with_a_threat_to_death_culture_+.shtml