Richard Dawkins' ugly but logical conclusion

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins generated an ethical firestorm last month when he responded to a tweet by a woman wondering what she would do if she were pregnant with a child who had Down syndrome. “Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice,” Dawkins tweeted back. I talked with John Stonestreet of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview about the public’s reaction to Dawkins’s statement.

NICK EICHER: Pro-abortion people either ignored Dawkins’ boorish provocation or professed their embarrassment. John, you actually thought, in his own way, Dawkins was being helpfully honest.

JOHN STONESTREET: Absolutely … and being consistent. If you don’t have any sort of inherent categories for establishing human dignity and therefore value, then it’s not enough to say that a child has value if I want it, it doesn’t have value if I don’t want it. … What women do day-in and day-out is they say that a child who has Down syndrome is not worth the resources of their energy, of their time, of their effort. In other words, the cost-benefit analysis doesn’t work out. It’s only if you say that all life has inherent dignity and value that you have any sort of category upon which to make this decision that’s anything less than arbitrary. So Dawkins is merely trying to impose some sort of rational category on what is obviously true, which is without any sort of inherent dignity, those who cause too much inconvenience to us are not worthy of life. … What was stunning about it was how harshly people reacted to it. It was like he put a big mirror up to the pro-choice crowd, and they didn’t like what they saw.

NE: My wife and I have a daughter, Katherine, who would be 19 this year. She passed away as an infant in 1995 when she was less than four months old. She had a condition known as Trisomy 18. Down Syndrome is Trisomy 21, a tripling of the chromosomes in what’s supposed to be the 21st pair. Trisomy 18, a tripling at what’s supposed to be the 18th pair, is a very dangerous condition. Something like half of the kids who have this disorder are stillborn, and of those who make it, only 1 in 10 get a first birthday.

In light of eternity, when you think about living four months or four years or 40 years or 80, the difference, of course, is utterly insignificant to the choice that Richard Dawkins wants to bully conflicted women and families into making.

Dawkins speaks out for ethical consistency, taking his worldview to its logical conclusion. That’s helpful for making the pro-abortion side carry its ethical burden. But I wonder sometimes if people like Dawkins don’t desensitize us into thinking it’s a hard truth, but we want what we want and we don’t want to lose our rights. What do you say about that?

JS: I think that desensitization is a real phenomenon. I’m not sure we can blame it on Dawkins. I think we can blame it on our commodification of the way we do almost every stage of procreation from the beginning to an end these days. As my friend Sean McDowell likes to say, we’ve separated babies from sex and sex from babies. With that has also come this whole consumerist mindset: What sort of children do we want, when do we want them, and if we don’t want them and they’re inconvenient, what we can do? What I saw in this quote from Dawkins this week was really interesting. … It’s so far over-the-top, people react. … This is where we see the truth of natural law. The natural law—the law written on our hearts, what we know to be true about God and the world and ethics and ourselves—is something we can suppress, and we’re really good at suppressing it. But, every once in a while, something becomes so blatantly offensive that it brings that natural law to head. And that’s what I saw this past week is in this comment, is, you just have to admit, Dawkins is actually being consistent. He’s actually being more consistent than those who want to just base human dignity on arbitrary human choice.

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