On Wednesday, biologist and new atheist Richard Dawkins became tangled in another Twitter war of his own making when he suggested mothers who are pregnant with children diagnosed with Down syndrome should “Abort it and try again,” because it would be “immoral” to bring a child with the condition into the world.
Dawkins made the comment in response to another user who said she would face “a real ethical dilemma” if she became pregnant and learned the child had Down syndrome.
@InYourFaceNYer Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 20, 2014
When Dawkins received some blowback from Twitter users, he replied:
Apparently I’m a horrid monster for recommending WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS to the great majority of Down Syndrome fetuses. They are aborted.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 20, 2014
In America, around 92 percent of women who receive a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome abort their pregnancies, and the development of improved testing may lead to increased targeting of Downs children for abortion.
Dawkins’ rant continued throughout the day, tweeting that he would not apologize “for approaching moral philosophic questions in a logical way,” and that his standard for the immorality of giving birth to a Downs child was based upon possible suffering. He tweeted, “Yes. Suffering should be avoided. [The abortion] cause[s] no suffering. Reduce suffering wherever you can.”
The Down’s Syndrome Association issued to Dawkins a tepid response in this vein, stating: “People with Down’s Syndrome can and do live full and rewarding lives, they also make a valuable contribution to our society. At the Down’s Syndrome Association, we do not believe Down’s Syndrome in itself should be a reason for termination, however, we realise that families must make their own choice.”
In a more impassioned response, Live Action President Lila Rose criticized Dawkins, writing:
“It’s sick and twisted for anyone to advocate for the killing of children with disabilities. Dawkins’ ignorant comments serve only to further stigmatize people with Down syndrome. While many people with Down syndrome, their families, and advocacy groups are fighting discrimination on a daily basis, Dawkins calls for their murder before they are even born. Those with Down syndrome are human beings, with innate human dignity, and they, along with the whole human family, deserve our respect and protection.”
Thursday, Dawkins wrote “An Apology for Letting Slip the Dogs of Twitterwar” to politely state, in more than 140 characters, why people with Down syndrome should not exist. Dawkins admitted that his “phraseology may have been tactlessly vulnerable to misunderstanding” but his statement “simply follows logically from the ordinary pro-choice stance that most of us, I presume, espouse.”
Yet Dawkins is perhaps not such a stickler for logic as he presumes. Dawkins is right that a systematic termination of pregnancies when children have apparently undesirable features, like Downs, is the logical result of pro-choice advocacy. But his standard for the morality of abortion is not rooted in a rational — and thus fixed — standard.
Dawkins writes that “As embryonic development proceeds towards term, the morality of abortion becomes progressively more difficult to assess. There is no hard and fast dividing line. … The definition of personhood is a gradual, ‘fading in / fading out’ definition.”
Dawkins’ flippancy with a changing definition of personhood — the most important factor in the right to abortion vs. right to life debate — has greater consequences than he admits and leads logically to debate over personhood of human beings outside the womb, as a group of Oxford ethicists have already argued.
In his description of the different types of Twitter blowback he received, Dawkins writes that he has sympathy for people who were offended by his comments because they have a family member with Down syndrome, but their offense is an “emotional” point and “not a logical one.” But Dawkins’ argument is a logical charade.
There are some things only brilliant intellectuals can believe.
