Richard Dawkins Doubles Down: “Moral and Sensible Choice” is to Abort Babies With Down Syndrome

International   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Aug 21, 2014   |   11:12AM   |   Washington, DC

Richards Dawkins is doubling down on his controversial comments yesterday suggesting that parents of babies with Down Syndrome should “abort them and try again.” Today, Dawkins says aborting babies with Down syndrome is the “moral and sensible” choice.

In a newly-released column responding to the firestorm of criticism Dawkins has faced, he doubles down on his claim that special needs babies should become victims of abortion.

Description=Richard Dawkins Photograph: Jeremy Young 05-12-2006Dawkins starts his column complaining about how people on twitter discovered his tweets promoting abortion. Then, he launches into a new defense of his pro-abortion thesis.

“For what it’s worth, my own choice would be to abort the Down fetus and, assuming you want a baby at all, try again. Given a free choice of having an early abortion or deliberately bringing a Down child into the world, I think the moral and sensible choice would be to abort,” he says about what he would tell a parent of a baby diagnosed in the womb with Down syndrome. “And, indeed, that is what the great majority of women, in America and especially in Europe, actually do.”
And, again, Dawkins says it would be immoral not to kill such a baby in an abortion.

“I personally would go further and say that, if your morality is based, as mine is, on a desire to increase the sum of happiness and reduce suffering, the decision to deliberately give birth to a Down baby, when you have the choice to abort it early in the pregnancy, might actually be immoral from the point of view of the child’s own welfare,” Dawkins says.

Dawkins then deplores the horrible way in which parents of children with Down syndrome are forced to provide them with a loving home and care and support simple because they have a certain genetic condition. His comments are sure to stoke the fires of condemnation coming from parents and families of people with Down syndrome.

“In any case, you would probably be condemning yourself as a mother (or yourselves as a couple) to a lifetime of caring for an adult with the needs of a child. Your child would probably have a short life expectancy but, if she did outlive you, you would have the worry of who would care for her after you are gone. No wonder most people choose abortion when offered the choice,” he writes.

Dawkins then aplogizes for the tweets, only in the sense that they did not offer his complete thoughts on the matter.

“Of course I regret using abbreviated phraseology which caused so much upset,” he says — ignoring the fact that his longer position paper issued today essentially makes the same arguments for killing babies with Down syndrome.

As LifeNews has reported, charities for children and adults with Down syndrome are incensed by his past comments on Twitter and will be further outraged by these.