Is Shortness a Disability?

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