Gene therapy restored hearing in deaf patients

It's good that the article title doesn't use "congenital deafness", but it would be even better if it were simply "Deafness Cured!" /s

Controversial in the same way cochlear implants are.

Many deaf/Deaf parents want children who hear. And I think absent the cultural consideration, almost all would want children who hear.

But you can't ignore the cultural consideration. If you are deaf, and have a deaf child, curing that child's deafness means they will move away from you later in life. It's a kind of alienation even when the child remains bicultural, they usually end up almost entirely in the hearing world.

That said, most deaf people who have children have hearing children anyway. Hereditary deafness like that is relatively rare like that.

But for people from such families, and who live in a culturally deaf world -- they are not disabled. The cultural environment they live in is ... one in which deafness is not disabling. And it's going to be a very high hill to climb to convince them that they are missing something. They certainly don't feel it. This is particularly true in the United States which has such a proud tradition of deaf culture and education -- you can go all the way to doctorate level studies in ASL, work in ASL, the hearing world being a strange foreign culture you only rarely wade into -- only rarely need to.

I'd cure it for myself, and my child if I had one. No question. But I'm not culturally deaf. I feel isolated by it in the same way most hearing people anticipate deafness to be as an experience. But again -- people who live in the deaf cultural world -- they do not feel that, and they don't feel disabled because, in their context, they aren't. It's hard to communicate this to most hearing people. The usual response is dismissive, and unfortunately I think a lot of that ultimately goes back to very old metaphysical attitudes towards language and intelligence. A lot of hearing people still don't believe, deep down, that sign languages are equivalent to spoken languages, in particular. It's just gesture. You're lacking something essential to the human condition without spoken language. Etc. But for the culturally deaf, nothing is missing from their lives, except the perception of sound.

There are few things that make me angrier than trying to hold back cures for deafness because of "cultural erasure" or whatever the phrasing is. It is utterly reprehensible. To try to keep someone disabled (yes - disabled, not "differently abled", they are objectively lacking a capability that a healthy human has) just so that there are more people in your community is objectively evil in my book. It is directly doing harm to people for one's own benefit.

If a person wishes to not get a certain treatment - fine, that's their right. But when one starts trying to keep others down, that's not ok.

Sorry, but they are differently abled. Their brains and perceptions are different from people who can hear. You are assuming that those differences are all negatives. They do not believe that to be the case.

Many people here self-diagnose as Asperger's. Can you not see why they would not want a "cure"?

Being an extrovert objectively gives you great advantages in (most) societies. As an introverted parent, I would definitely fight any "cure" for my introverted children.

Furthermore, if both parents are deaf and the kid is not deaf, there's a good chance that in the first so many years of life, the kid will have poorer mental development than the deaf kid. Not quite the same, but an example: Deaf kids born to deaf parents hit the same language milestones as hearing kids born to hearing parents. But deaf kids born to hearing parents do worse, because the parents don't know the appropriate way of thinking/communicating.

Related: Deaf kids who were given cochlear implants, but no sign language training fared a lot worse than both hearing kids and deaf kids who learned sign language.