many deaf people see themselves as a "linguistic minority" rather than a disabled group. For this group, whose leading spokesman is the (non-deaf) writer Harlan Lane, a deaf child will always be deaf and should not be stripped of his or her cultural birthright by a misplaced effort at mainstreaming.
(Does this mean that if two deaf parents bring up a child who's capable of hearing, that child will nonetheless be culturally Deaf? Could a culture of hearing-capable Deaf people, its memes rooted in vestigial workarounds for hearing loss, arise at some time in the future? The mind boggles...)