Debate over cochlear implants continues among Australian Deaf community

From The Age in Australia. In the picture, five-year-old Kayla Trinder-Scacco and 10-year-old Sarah Keenan talk in Auslan.

As an infant, a cochlear implant gave Sarah Keenan, now 10, the gift of hearing, but the decision gave her parents much angst.

"I agonised that the surgery might be telling her she wasn't good enough if she couldn't hear," said her mother, Roz Keenan. "Would it change her identity as she got older? I felt that, in the end, if I gave it to her she could choose later (how to communicate)." Sarah can now do both — talk and sign.

Tamara Trinder-Scacco made a different decision for her daughter. Kayla, 5, wears a hearing aid for environmental sound but is deaf to the spoken word.

"She can (have a cochlear implant) but we choose not to," said Ms Trinder-Scacco.

"I'm deaf, my husband's deaf and our first language is Auslan (sign language). When Kayla was born, I didn't know enough about cochlear at the time and I wasn't comfortable with it. It wasn't a hard decision for me — look at me, I grew up fine and I can see the same for Kayla provided she gets the support."

The difficult choice faced by these northern suburbs parents over the cochlear implant is shared by the deaf in general, even as the Federal Government's new national hearing screening program means more deaf infants than ever could gain from the device.

A cochlear implant, also known as a bionic ear, is a surgically implanted electronic device for the profoundly deaf. Unlike hearing aids, it does not amplify sound but directly stimulates any functioning auditory nerves in the inner ear. Invented by Melbourne researcher Graeme Clark in the 1970s, the implant became widely used from the mid-1980s.

The Government's screening program pledges that from 2011, all newborn babies will be screened for deafness. Now, 75 per cent are screened. About 500 children a year are born with profound to moderate deafness, but it is often not detected for months or years.

Professor Clark, founding director of La Trobe University's Centre for Bionic Ear and Neurosensory Research, said diagnosis before the age of 12 months was critical. "The new legislation will then enable severe to profoundly deaf children to compete with their hearing peers on a normal footing," said Professor Clark. "In Sweden, 95 per cent of profoundly deaf children have a cochlear implant."

Professor Clark said every year in Australia 100 children needed an implant. "Last year there were 70 new recipients. That means 30 deaf children — 30 per cent — did not have an implant when they needed one."

But the deaf community remains divided. "There's a huge school of thought for cochlear implants and there's a huge school of thought against cochlear implants," said Marc Curtis, manager of Vicdeaf Auslan and Interpreting Services in East Melbourne.

"It's a really politically charged, difficult, difficult issue to discuss."

Lobby group Deaf Australia says the implant "implies that deaf people are ill or incomplete individuals, are lonely and unhappy, cannot communicate effectively with others and are all desperately searching for a cure for their condition. (This) demeans deaf people, belittles their culture and language and makes no acknowledgment of the diversity of lives deaf people lead, or their many achievements."

David Peters, an information officer with Vicdeaf, and deaf himself, said the notion that deafness was a deficiency to be cured was offensive.

"The deaf community feel that when you're deaf, you're a normal person … I feel perfectly normal so I don't see why I should need to have that surgery."

The age at which children should have the implant was an "ongoing argument", he said, with some believing it should be a personal — not parental — decision.

But Professor Clark said infants needed to hear from an early age if they were going to speak. He said it was better for deaf children to have to hear rather than rely on sign language.

"Sign language has been of enormous help in the years gone by … but in the world of sound, it's extremely limited. It's a matter of choice, but instead of not being sure how effective children will be in the hearing world, they now have every opportunity to compete with their hearing peers."

There is also a risk that deaf people who don't have a cochlear implant could be marginalised. With more deaf people able to hear, the number using Auslan will shrink.

The 2006 census showed there were 2172 sign-language users in Victoria and 7150 Australia-wide.

The Royal Institute of Deaf and Blind Children's website states Auslan is "endangered" for reasons including better medical treatment for deafness, cochlear implants and falling enrolments in schools for the deaf.