In the two weeks since The Washington Post reported on Sharon Duchesneau and Candace McCullough, a deaf lesbian couple who used a deaf sperm donor to increase the odds of having a deaf child, the issues around disability rights and the creation of so-called designer babies have been hotly and transcontinentally debated.

But what is so interesting about the story of the couple’s six-month-old son Gauvin (who is deaf, according to early testing), is that it created such a stir at all.

After all, it’s hardly a brave new world that Duchesneau and McCullough have entered, nor are their desires to have a specific kind of child unique.

Don’t all would-be parents hope to have children just like themselves, or better? Don’t they do everything they can to ensure it?

They take vitamins and play Mozart to their fetus. They undergo genetic screening during pregnancy to detect potential birth defects. Some parents attempt to have a child of a specific gender.

Single women and infertile or lesbian couples who avail themselves of the services of sperm banks can choose from a pool of thousands of their own designer donors, selecting one according to height, weight, age, ethnicity, religion, complexion, hair and eye colour, medical history, education and hobbies.

Some sperm banks will even let clients know whether a donor is balding or particularly attractive. And those are just a few of the routine examples.

The truly bizarre include everything from the Raelian’s (a religious group that contends extraterrestrials used genetic engineering to create life on Earth) plan to clone children, to an infertile San Diego couple, who, in a 1998 newspaper ad, offered US $80,000 for the eggs of an Ivy League student, who was at least five-foot-ten, had a scholastic assessment test (SAT) score of at least 1,400 and who possessed some athletic prowess.

In the case of Gauvin, most of the outcry has focused on his mothers’ preference to have deaf children (the couple’s five-year-old daughter Jehanne, conceived with the same donor, is also deaf).

“A hearing baby would be a blessing,” they told The Washington Post . “A deaf baby would be a special blessing.”

Critics have charged that Duchesneau and McCullough have — in engineering two disabled children — selfishly sentenced them to lives of limited potential.

For their part, the two loving, articulate, graduate-degree-holding moms argue that deafness is a unique and rich culture with its own language, art, politics, academic institutions and opportunities.

In wanting deaf children, they are no different than immigrant parents who want their children to speak the family’s mother tongue and uphold its traditions, or, more pointedly, hearing parents who hope to have hearing children.

It’s a compelling argument and a challenging one to those who see deaf people as only objects of pity. And if the argument against Duchesneau and McCullough wanting deaf children is that deaf people experience prejudice and face barriers, shouldn’t the goal be to reduce those prejudices and those barriers, not the number of people who experience them?

The disability issue aside, what I really think has gotten under the skin of people is that Duchesneau and McCullough are honest in a way that many parents are not.

Their desire for deaf children is a cogent illustration that parenting is not just about love and unselfish nurturing, but also about ego and pride and wish fulfillment. That’s not shameful, it’s inevitable.

Parenting is the only relationship that allows one person, at least for a time, to have total control over another. To decide what they will eat, when they will sleep, what medical care they will receive, where they will go to school, what they do in their spare time.

It’s a most profound responsibility and as a result most parents do, to a degree, see their kids as an extension and reflection of themselves.

It’s a rare parent who doesn’t harbour some kind of selfish hope or expectation for their child, but most parents, the good ones, ultimately love and accept their kids for who they are.

The others, well, they become those creepy control freaks who force their kids into beauty pageants, or into hyper-competitive sports, or send them off to snobby university-prep, pre-schools.

Where do Duchesneau and McCullough fall in this spectrum? Have they played God with their children’s future? Have they done a disservice to their children for helping to make them deaf? Will Jehanne and Gauvin resent the decision they made?

We’ll have to wait for the answers. Because the only people who can respond to those questions with authority are Jehanne and Gauvin ten or twenty years down the road.