Abortion rights - and duties?

Why the atheist call to abort the disabled is doomed

Says the outraged author, Naomi Shaffer Riley,

“Abort it and try again.”

Those were the recent words of Richard Dawkins, responding to a tweet from a woman who said she would see it as “a real ethical dilemma” if she became pregnant with a baby with Down syndrome.

Actually, not quite.

What he said was, "Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice," when he might simply have asked, "If abortion is lawful and otherwise not objectionable, why not abort and try again?"

For what emergency were you saving your precious abortion rights, in other words?

Women who have the option pretty much everywhere exercise it to avoid having children with serious birth defects or genetic disorders.

Some do it to select for sex.

By no mean all do it to avoid having the child of a rapist or a casual sex partner, perhaps of the wrong race, though of course some do.

Or as a form of family planning, to avoid have too many children.

But so far as I know only liberals have suggested women have a moral duty not to give birth to defective children.

[David Benatar says women have a moral duty not to give birth to any children. Quite a different thing.]

And, as in the present case, rest that claim on the argument that the child's life would be so awful it would be wrong to "bring it into the world."

That is, wrong not to kill it while it's still out of sight.

Anyway, I am unaware of any reasons why life is especially awful for people with Down's Syndrome, though I suppose that's possible.

And I quite agree that in some cases abortion can be a kindness, as can infanticide or, in later life, euthanasia.

But is a life with Down's Syndrome really so bad as to make abortion seem a kindness?

I doubt it.

This is a case where the parents have an opportunity to spare themselves an unwanted burden, or simply an unwanted feature in any child of theirs.

I can well understand the PC morality police going out of their way to provide moral cover for such a choice.

But this goes beyond that and makes it a positive duty.

And so I suspect RD of unspoken eugenicist bias and a willingness to urge upon us morals tending toward improvement of the species, as measured by commonly held values like intelligence, say.

Ah, well.

Culture wars.