NYT Op-Ed Goes After Atheist's Ardor for Down Syndrome Abortions

Apparently, Richard Dawkins' aggressive advocacy for aborting babies diagnosed with Down Syndrome and the potential damage it could inflict on the pro-abortion movement was too much for even the New York Times to handle.

On August 20, Matthew Balan at NewsBusters covered Dawkins' vile position and his equally vile way of expressing it ("Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice"). Several NewsBusters commenters noted that the presence of Down Syndrome in pre-born babies can be and has been misdiagnosed in babies born perfectly healthy. In a Thursday New York Times op-ed published in Friday's print edition, Jamie Edgin and Fabian Fernandez conveyed the results of studies finding that Dawkins' assumption that families with a Down Syndrome child are predominantly miserable is (excuse the pun) dead wrong.

The authors almost got to where they needed to go, but chickened out on the most paramount issue by focusing only on what they called "the facts" (bolds are mine):

The Truth About Down Syndrome



But Mr. Dawkins’s argument is flawed. ... because his understanding of the facts is mistaken. Recent research indicates that individuals with Down syndrome can experience more happiness and potential for success than Mr. Dawkins seems to appreciate.





... Recent work also suggests that the cognitive impairment that is a hallmark of Down syndrome might eventually be managed by medical interventions.



The problem with the authors' piece lies in two places: the final bolded excerpt above, and in wording I deliberately omitted from the second excerpted paragraph, namely, "Not because his moral reasoning is wrong, necessarily (that is a question for another day) ..." In other words, they wouldn't take what they found to its logical conclusion.

Dawkins' "moral reasoning," which is not moral at all, is not "a question for another day." It is the question. Does a pre-born baby have the God-given inalienable right to life this country's Founders identified, or is it disposable at the whims of the baby's parents?

The obvious morally correct answer can only be the former. The tragic choice this country has made is that it can and should be the latter — something which Dawkins, as Balan noted in his post, celebrates ("What I recommended is not outlandish but the norm"). Dawkins typifies the national ugliness and callousness 40-plus years of legalized abortion have wrought. Happy Down Syndrome patients and their families give lie to the proabort propaganda that happiness lies only in perfection and lack of challenge. Even the New York Times found Dawkins' crude expression of where proabort "logic" takes you too much to take.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

Tom Blumer
Tom Blumer
Tom Blumer is a contributing editor for NewsBusters.