lheritier1789

I'm a bisexual person who's living mostly as a straight person, so I feel like I get the analogy you're trying to draw. Obviously there are a lot of social drawbacks to being gay and straight life is much simpler.

But that is the distinction: the downsides to being gay are just social. There are literally 0 physical downsides to being gay. In contrast, deaf people benefit from the ADA and require special accommodation beyond just a language barrier. I'm not sure how one can call for special accommodation without admitting to having a disability. Even pregnant women, depending on their physical state, can sometimes qualify for short term disability.

Furthermore, although the "symptom" of being gay vs being deaf can seem similar sometimes--i.e. being excluded from certain roles or social situations, because of the fundamentally different etiology the solution must also be different. In order for a gay child to have the widest possible set of options in terms of their career/contribution to society, all we have to do is eliminate social stigma. They can then have any career they want, including that of a stay at home parent. In contrast, there are jobs that a deaf person cannot perform without being a serious liability on their team members--e.g. emergency physician, LEO, etc. It doesn't matter what you do to change the context of society, no responsible dispatcher is ever going to send a deaf police officer to an active crime scene. Therefore, by keeping the child deaf, regardless of what hopes we hold for social change, parents are limiting the child's future choices; in my opinion this is wrong.

I met one of the commercial team members that set the price for Elaprase a few years ago. From their perspective, obviously by the time you get to the pricing stage, you focus on maximizing revenue; however, for the drug to have gone through all the development processes and been introduced to the market, for such a small patient population, the high price is kind of a necessary evil. Is that an argument that you are sympathetic toward? What's your take?

Thank you!

Thank you for doing this! I have a question:

Most of us live in peace time today but there is still a lot of instability in the world. Do you have any spiritual advice for our generation in dealing with war/conflicts?

Thank you especially for the links! That's exactly what I was curious about.