Alexander Graham Bell Advocated For Not Allowing Deaf People to Get Married or Have Children
Most people know that Alexander Graham Bell was the inventor of the telephone. But fewer people know that he was a teacher for deaf people. His own mother was hearing-impaired, and he even married a deaf woman named Mabel Hubbard. However, he believed that deafness was a “contamination” of the human race.
He believed that deaf people would give birth to deaf children, and that it would spread through the population. In 1883, he presented a paper called Memoir Upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race. He suggested that deaf people should not be allowed to get married. (Which is hypocritical, since he married a deaf woman and had four children with her.) And he did not want people to use sign language.
