Wednesday, 13 November 2024

CleftPals Victoria

Moira DEEMING (Western Metropolitan) (09:56): Cleft Awareness Week runs from 8 to 14 November. The Cleft Palate & Lip Society, CleftPals, exists to support kids with clefts and their families. CleftPals provides life-changing advice and support for kids born with cleft palates and cleft lips and for their families too, who are often hurting and confused. Last weekend CleftPals Victoria celebrated their 50th anniversary, so congratulations to them and a big thankyou to CleftPals from all of us here at Parliament.

A cleft lip and/or palate is the most common craniofacial abnormality, affecting one in 700 babies. Clefts can vary from a small notch in the lip to a complete separation of the lip, nose and upper palate. Clefts can be on one side or both sides of the lip. My husband was one of those babies, and for severity his clefts were rated as seven out of 10. His parents were told he would never be able to talk and told by some others that it would have been better for him to have been aborted.

Having a child born with a cleft lip or palate can be very confronting and frightening for parents. A child with a cleft will require numerous rounds of plastic surgery and often extensive orthodontal care and bone grafts. Kids with clefts also experience high rates of inner ear infections and often require speech therapy. As they grow up into tweens and teenagers many experience mental health issues from looking and sounding different from their peers, and they need psychological support. Life for kids born with clefts, and their parents, is tough. Amazing groups like CleftPals, who supported my husband and his family from the moment of his birth right up until his last surgeries as a 21-year-old, when we were in our on-and-off-again engagement phase, meant that he thrived and he succeeded, and now I am benefiting from all that care in that I have a wonderful husband and my children have a wonderful father.