1. I wish to thank Catherine Mills, Kate Crawford, Jeremy Aarons, Lyn Gillam, Neil Levy, Jacqui Broad, and the participants of the Victorian Council of Deaf Persons State Conference, Melbourne, 2002, for comments and discussion which have improved this article.
2. 1Because deafness early in life makes it extremely difficult for individuals to acquire speech, there are powerful incentives to provide deaf children with the implant at a very young age.
3. 2For accounts, see: H. Lane, "The Cochlear Implant Controversy,"WFD News, July 1994, pp. 22-8; E. Dolnick, "Deafness as Culture,"The Atlantic Monthly, September, 1993, pp. 37-53. I will follow other writers in the area by using capital D "Deaf" to indicate a cultural identity and lower case "deaf" to refer to those whose level of hearing does not allow them to live easily in a spoken-language-oriented society.
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