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Kyle Munkittrick encountered a story of a family who was encouraged to give their son growth hormones so that he would grow taller than the predicted 5′ 5″, which is just slightly taller than his parents. One parent thinks that may be a good idea; the other is appalled at the idea of treating a child for a normal condition.
Crack open any text on bioethics and I can almost guarantee that the “is shortness a disability” example will be somewhere among the pages. Shortness (and deafness, which The Dish is also exploring at the moment) sits right in the blurry space among disability, disease, and normal. How short is “too short?” Why is 5’2? too short for a man, but not a woman? The answer is pretty much: because we think it is. Human height does fall along a bell curve, but it varies around the world and throughout history. Yet, at some point, being short goes from a relative and descriptive term (e.g. I am shorter than Yao Ming) to a normative one implying a disability.
Growing taller than you would normally can have its advantages, but its all relative to the height of others around you. What would you do in this situation? Munkittrick looks at how we define “disability” at Science Not Fiction. Link
If you were ever a witness to a crime, and you were asked to provide the height and weight of the suspect, would you be able to do it? Do you have any idea what 266 lb on a 6’3" frame look like?
This may help: Rob Cockerham of cockeyed.com is creating photographic chart of height/weight. You can submit your own image, given that the particular body height/weight slot isn’t taken …
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