Oh dear. Here we go again. Another item for the big master list of things not to say on Twitter.
InYourFaceNewYorker @InYourFaceNYer 2h
@RichardDawkins @AidanMcCourt I honestly don’t know what I would do if I were pregnant with a kid with Down Syndrome. Real ethical dilemma.Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins
@InYourFaceNYer Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.
The Independent is already on it.
Budding atheists wondering whether Richard Dawkins is in need of a little time away from Twitter to reflect on the past few weeks are about to have their (lack of) prayers answered.
The philosopher has managed to go one step further than his controversial comments on ‘date rape versus stranger rape’ to voice his opinions on what it would be ethical for a mother who is informed that her unborn child has Down Syndrome to do.
He started off his conversation with followers ethically enough, highlighting the plight of women in Ireland, where abortion is illegal, in light of the recent reports of the country’s refusal to provide a safe abortion to a suicidal rape victim. She was forced to give birth.
“Ireland is a civilised country except in this 1 area,” he tweeted, adding “You’d think the Roman Church would have lost all influence,” to caption a link to a similar article.
But then the provocateurs sent by the cabal of Secret Theocratic Underground Operatives got to work.
But after engaging in conversation with a number of users, his ethical values appeared to come a little unstuck.
“994 human beings with Down’s Syndrome deliberately killed before birth in England and Wales in 2012. Is that civilised?” @AidanMcCourt asked.
“Yes, it is very civilised. These are fetuses, diagnosed before they have human feelings,” Dawkins responded.
“I honestly don’t know what I would do if I were pregnant with a kid with Down Syndrome. Real ethical dilemma,” @InYourFaceNYer chimed in.
“Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice,” he tweeted back.
Job done! All it took was two tweets! The cabal of Secret Theocratic Underground Operatives is laughing its fiendish collective laugh as atheism takes yet another broadside hit in the reputation.
The philosopher
Rather obviously, Dawkins is not a philosopher.
Yikes, I didn’t even notice that.
Is Dawkins being paid to reinforce negative stereotypes about atheists and, more recently, advocates of reproductive choice? Because if he is, some right-wing scumbag is making a damn good investment.
Also, Dawkins isn’t telling this woman anything she didn’t already know: she said it was a real ethical dilemma, and all he did was restate one side of that dilemma.
I wonder if anyone thought to ask Dawkins what he’d do if tests showed that he was prone to put his foot in his mouth whenever he logs into twitter? Would he stop using twitter, or just let all those tweets come to term anyway?
I keep thinking he will shortly announce a book or something, because controversy sells
Sorry, but I’m confused. I thought the reason tests are done in high-risk mothers is to detect Down syndrome and other problems in order that women be given the chance to have an abortion, if they so chose.
Why offer the tests otherwise? Aborting a fetus with severe birth defects (of which Down syndrome is definitely among the list) isn’t an ethical dilemma. It’s one of the key reasons why abortion should be freely available.
I guess I’m not “getting” your objections. That Dawkins is advocating for actually using abortion for one of the purposes for which it’s intended? Or is it because of the unique situation of Down syndrome — which has the persistent (and horribly wrong) meme of being a “nice” birth defect?
How is Dawkins advocating abortion in that setting any different “foot-in-mouth” wise than advocating for late-term abortions because of a woman’s right to bodily autonomy?
Seriously not getting it.
I’ve bolded the key words for you here, just to make it a little easier to spot.
The problem is that he’s saying that only one choice is the moral one.
To make it even clearer: you (or Dawkins) don’t get to tell other people what choices they should make in this situation. Especially not given that it’s a situation that he is never actually going to have to face himself.
Kevin Kehres–
The point is, it’s the mother’s choice. In many cases with the father’s input, but ultimately the mother’s choice. It’s not up to you or to Dawkins to dictate the mother’s decision, any more than it’s the Catholic or Southern Baptist church’s right to do so.
I’ve known one Down syndrome woman quite well. She was very sweet and a lot of us were sad when she died in her late forties. (A typical age of death for Down syndrome people.) At the same time, we were relieved that her parents are living long, healthy lives and were able to care for her to the end. There was a true moral dilemma there. Should the mother have aborted that fetus, who ultimately grew up to give her parents and friends a lot of joy, on the chance that she would have ended up a burden on her normal sister? (The sister would have tried to care for her, I’m sure. But with a full time job and her own family….)
This issue illustrates exactly why women need the autonomy to makes their own decisions. Not the churches, and not Dawkins, either.
And yet, when asked for advice, what would you do? Just say “I dunno, you decide?” Coward.
I had a similar incident happen to me a couple years back — friend’s sister had tests showing a severe birth defect. She was conflicted and asked my advice. My advice was “abort”. Which she eventually did (followed shortly thereafter by an uneventful pregnancy and healthy baby).
I’m not allowed to have that opinion or express it when asked? The man was asked a question and gave an answer.
I think you’re jerking your anti-Dawkins knee just a bit too hard. And I say this as someone who has been critical of Dawkins for several years.
“Coward”? That’s cute.
Well for a start, even if I were asked for “advice” I wouldn’t give it ON TWITTER.
And to continue, I don’t think I would give “advice” in any case (and I would hope people wouldn’t ask me). I can see discussing it, talking about the consequences, that sort of thing, but not giving actual advice, because it’s not my fucking business. That’s not “cowardice” thank you.
@9 — So it’s the “happy Down kid” thing.
Problem is, a LOT of Down syndrome folks aren’t happy, aren’t capable of anything other than short miserable lives in institutions or worse. Down syndrome drives families apart, impoverishes them, imprisons elderly parents by forcing them to care for adult children until they die, and on and on.
By rigidly enforcing this stereotype of “happy-loving-special” that is most likely the minority of cases, we’re censuring women who DO make the choice to abort. It’s wrong.
“It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice,” is not advice, it’s a proclamation. Even staying within Twitter’s 140 character limit, you could be a bit more circumspect about it than that. He’s just flat-out asserted that anybody who’s ever decided to continue with a Down’s pregnancy acted immorally. That’s a pretty fucking major statement.
Oh come on…he was asked a hypothetical on Twitter. You’re expecting him to say what exactly based on that exchange? “I dunno…you decide?”
I think you’re looking for reasons to be angry at the man. You don’t have to go much farther than the instant case to find plenty of them. I think that in this example, your anger is misplaced.
Frankly, given the same hypothetical and a 140-character limit, my answer would have been almost the same. It would have been something like “Down syndrome is a serious birth defect and abortion is often the most ethical option for all involved. Yes, I’d abort.”
How can I advocate that women have the right to abort perfectly healthy fetuses if somehow this one class of not-healthy fetus is off limits?
Withdrawing now.
And that would have been perfectly fine, because you’re not stating it as a moral absolute.
That’s not what anybody is saying here.
Is this becoming a weekly thing now? Dawkins tweeting some exclusionary or hyperbolic proclamation, I mean, not flame-wars started by someone desperately spinning on his behalf.
It would be immoral to bring it into the world
… is not a statement of respect for the mother’s choice. It’s declaring a moral absolute. There’s your difference for you.
And, with respect to twitter not allowing sufficient text for precise replies: it allows sufficient text for fucking stupid replies. If you can be fucking stupid, you can be precise. Or, you can write a precise reply and post the link in twitter. Or, you can make an ass of yourself. As always, choices, choices, choices…
Kevin Kehres @14:
That sounds perfect. If you’re not given enough information to answer a question, why not state your justified ignorance? And as far as I know, Dawkins is pro-choice; it’s a bit hypocritical to argue people should be free to control their own bodies, then turn around and state what to do with that body in a specific instance.
Depressingly, you just put more thought into that offhand comment than a famous science communicator put into their tweet on a sensitive subject.
Kevin Kehres @14: “Withdrawing now.”
Coward.
Actually, back up here a moment… He wasn’t “asked a hypothetical on Twitter”, nor was he “asked for advice”. At no point did anybody ask him what he would advise someone in that situation to do. Somebody else remarked that it was a “real ethical dilemma”, at which point he jumped in with both size 12s to issue a proclamation of moral certainty.
Kevin Kehres,
You’ve been around these parts for a while, you’ve heard us all talking about choice. Well, this is why.
In any case, why is Dawkins not down at the Irish Embassy this evening protesting the abuse of a very badly drafted law now being used to deny choice? That would be far more useful.
I actually agree with Dawkins, except that this is the moral choice for me and him.
Dawkins’s problem is that he has little demonstrated ability to be sensitive to the experiences of other people, especially with less social power as a group, and moral solutions necessarily have a social component. You can’t predict what a person can do in a situation. You can’t predict what a person wants to do based on what they experience, like lots of other people with loving relationships with children with Downs Syndrome. And you can’t do a good job helping someone resolve a moral conflict when your response is to simply dismiss all the emotions creating the conflict in the person you are “helping”. Really helping would be to help the person resolve those on their own terms.
Having really strong opinions that we are willing to project at others like weapons about things like the abortion issue is necessary because of how woman are harmed by that issue. Bet we don’t go pretending that the feelings of the anti-abortion folks don’t matter, we need to reason empathetically when we can and use them strategically when we must. That woman was not a threat so beating a complicated issue down and ignoring why a person is conflicted seems to be gaslighting on some levels.
I am thinking of finally having a baby in my late 30’s and I completely agree with Dawkins. Knowingly bringing a child with mental disabilities into the world is grossly immoral.
This is not aborting someone because they have an IQ below 80. Down Syndrome is a clear cut pathology, a pathology that fundamentally precludes full realization as a human being, unlike mere physical disabilities. It is further a pathology with no cure or prognosis of one.
Down Syndrome is just a harsh reminder of the biological inequality of humans at birth and I think that upsets certain utopian-ish social views that find a lot of favor here at FTB.
I don’t actually know enough about Down syndrome to speak with any authority, but as someone who does suffer from a mental disability I can’t help thinking that flat out classing Downs people as subhuman is unwise.
Perhaps that’s not what 23. meant, but ‘precludes full realization as a human being’ certainly sounds like it.
I am glad I will never have to make that choice, but as someone who could have been on the receiving end of it, having anyone categorically state that my birth was an immoral act seems very unfeeling. Note that I suffer depression severe enough to be occasionally suicidal myself, which in no way invalidates the foregoing.
Dawkins is known as a hardline atheist. Compare him with the much more numerous and influential hardline Christians, who would say with equal conviction and attempt to enforce it “It would be immoral not to bring it into the world if you have the choice”. Is it so obvious that atheism has taken a hit?
@Kevin Kehres
So you believe , that parents who choose to not abort a foetus, who might have Downs syndrome (the tests if I remember correctly are probabilities ), is behaving immorally?
@Katherine woo
Knowingly bringing a child with mental disabilities into the world is grossly immoral.
Here’s the thing – it would devastate my spouse to have an abortion(true, not hypothetical) – so whose suffering should I favor and how should I measure it to determine the immorality/ethics of the action?
Kevin @ 14 –
He doesn’t actually have to say anything. We’re allowed to ignore questions on Twitter. RD has a cool million followers, so he obviously can’t possibly answer all questions he gets asked. He could just decide “Nope, not on Twitter,” and ignore the question. Which wasn’t asked anyway, as Dunc @ 20 pointed out.
I think the DS was thrown in as a red herring because Sarah Palin supposedly “birthed” a child with DS. Who she admits via video message to her followers, at the age of 6, cannot eat solid food or speak more than 2 words, and may not be toilet-trained. That’s manageable at 6; what about when he’s 30?
I have a family member with profound disabilities, who at age 35 has the mental capacity of an 18-month old. She is not capable of being toilet trained, but is perfectly capable of soiling herself and smearing the results on the walls. We’re not sure if she recognizes her name, but she’s nearly 6 feet tall and 250 pounds and has the impulse control and temper tantrums of a toddler. She can’t be trusted in public because she lashes out and can kill an adult. She’s been on the waiting list for an appropriate placement for 22 years now, with no end in sight. Legally she’s entitled to a caregiver 4 hours a month for respite for her mother…but nobody’s ever shown up as scheduled because respite workers tend to be minimum-wage workers and they’d rather quit and take their chances in fast food, where their odds of getting killed on the job are much less. Her mother, who is in her early 60s, looks like she’s 90; she walks with two canes and has had cancer, likely from the stress of caring for a child with such profound disabilities (her father walked away from the marriage as soon as the extent of her issues were diagnosed).
People imagine people with disabilities are like that actor in the tv show; they can hold jobs and entertain and support themselves. Not all people with genetic issues are delightful sweet angels who just need an occasional pat on the back to thrive and succeed.
“it would devastate my spouse to have an abortion(true, not hypothetical) – so whose suffering should I favor and how should I measure it to determine the immorality/ethics of the action?”
On the one side you would be consigning another human being to a life where it can never achieve the mental faculties you and your spouse enjoy and, like most of us, probably take for granted most of the time. I don’t sit around, thinking, ‘I have the capacity to read!’ You also be doing so on a planet already stretched to its limits in terms of resource desires versus population, where the person would not be able to contribute to maintenance or progress in the human condition most likely. People with developed-world lifestyles having more than one child per person is immoral in my view as well.
It is not supportable in my view to weigh that against a spouse’s hypothetical, and yes it is hypothetical unless you have the abortion. Very few us truly cannot recover from major loses. I can cry just thinking about my dad dying some day, but I know I will get through it. People get over the death of healthy children. For most people, even if the abortion casues suffering, it is unlikely to be unyielding, life-curtailing in the long run. On top of that caring for a child the rest of your life is going to cause suffering too.
@Katherine Woo
” a pathology that fundamentally precludes full realization as a human being”
Fuck.
You.
My uncle was a “full human being”. You DO NOT get to negate his life simply because he had Down’s Syndrome.
“Fuck you. You DO NOT get to negate his life simply because he had Down’s Syndrome.”
I love the infatuation of some people here with the word “fuck”. I use it myself, but am slightly embarrassed when I do, because it is lazy and immature.
Anyway, I unapologetically take the view an unexamined life is not worthy living. Down Syndrome persons have the mental abilities of a child under age 10 for the most part. Was anyone here a fully realized human at 10? This strawman-rhetoric of “negating his life” is just discomfort at facing up to how different his ability to engage the world was.
And if he had never been born you would not even know most likely. Many of you are veering into the territory of anti-abortion zealots, who claim to see some divine value in every soul.
I would agree with him if the issue were terrible pain from birth to death. I do think it would be immoral to carry a fetus to term if that were the inevitable outcome.
But DS? No. Abortion is fine if that’s what the mother wants, and so is having the kid.
@Kevin Kehres
How about: “This is a highly individual choice and too complex an issue to adequately discuss in 140 characters.”
Downs Syndrome is highly variable. The underlying cause isn’t even the same in that some people have a full extra copy of the chromosome while others have only a partial trisomy. Others still have mosaic Downs Syndrome – in which case their expression of DS traits can be markedly reduced. Certain characteristics appear in only about half of the population, and the degree of those characteristics varies greatly. You cannot make sweeping generalizations about whether or not it’s moral to give birth to people with a genetic disorder that cannot itself be generalized.
Stephen Fry would disagree.
so would I.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_osQvkeNRM
and you border on the exact same arguments eugenecists used.
http://www.independentliving.org/docs1/pfeiffe1.html
you are woefully ignorant.
Ichthyic, you prove my point that you cannot articulate a defense yourself, but, and this makes it even more amusing, you point to a YouTube video. I don’t recall Martin Luther King or even Noam Chomsky (you seem likely to be a fan of his) needing to drop F-bombs to get a serious point across.
Yawn. “Eugenics” is a load word because of historical abuses, but really it is an utterly inevitable phenomenon that is already in the post as the Brits say. Genetic engineering is going to hit Gattaca-style in our lifetimes and you can either deal with it rationally or take up quasi-religious opposition to it. I see nothing wrong with eradicating clearcut pathologies (and trisomy is definitely one) before people are born.
[meta + OT]
Katherine Woo:
It’s adding emotional information; as with emoticons, it’s possible to misuse vulgarity.
This is the best explication I’ve seen for its utility: Putting the “Fan” in “Profanity”.
I doubt that’s true in the first place. However, more recent developments in early interventions and appropriate teaching for people with all kinds of intellectual delays and deficiencies, not just DS, mean that many more such children have much better opportunities to develop abilities well beyond simple reading. The fact that they may be over 20 before they reach middle school levels of such abilities just means that families, health workers and educators need to be patient and persistent. I’ve not taught any DS kids, but a few others with moderate to severe intellectual impairments. The fact that you have to devise individual learning programs for them and implement them in particular ways suited to the individual doesn’t detract from the fact that they can learn – and learn quite a lot. (I highly recommend the first couple of chapters of John Mighton’s The Myth of Ability for anyone interested. Wouldn’t do Richard D any harm either.)
As for diagnosis during pregnancy, a relative of mine has a child who might have been diagnosable with autism if such a test were available. (Though it’s more likely that the stroke he suffered either in utero or during birth is responsible for his problems.) At 12 years old he is still incontinent and has no words. He at least has learned to manage his own supersensitivity to environmental stimulations by keeping his noise control earmuffs on almost all the time. And that’s pretty much all he has learned.
His parents lives would have been much, much easier had he instead had DS of fair average quality severity. Might have required more medical interventions, too many people overlook the fact that often there are physical problems associated with DS. But importantly, that level allows intellectual, physical and personal development, if somewhat delayed, to the level of being able to converse, read, learn some maths (or just arithmetic), do some housework, swim, play sports, catch buses and manage money – either alone or with minimal assistance. Being able to do some, if not all, of these things can make a life well worth living.
The man was asked a question and gave an answer.
He gave her a REALLY SHITTY AND PATRONIZING answer (not to mention that he gave it in a tone, and a medium, that was utterly without tact or respect); one that very strongly implied she had zero right or reason to choose otherwise. That’s what we’re complaining about, and your apparent failure to understand this kinda says something about your ability to understand what’s at stake here.
There are better answers he could have given…like, oh, I dunno, “It’s ultimately your body, and your right to choose whether you have a baby; and FWIW, here’s my advice, based on what I’ve heard you say so far…” Or how about “This is your choice to make, and I’ll respect it either way, but here’s my email (or someone else’s) if you want to discuss it in more detail…” ?
You’re expecting him to say what exactly based on that exchange? “I dunno…you decide?”
Well, given that Dawkins clearly DOESN’T know, I really don’t see why that’s such a bad answer for him to give. If a woman asked me that question, I’d have to be an amazingly dishonest jackass to pretend I DID know what choice she had to make.
And, as Ophelia said, since the question was hypothetical and asked publicly, and since it was really more of a prediction than a question, Dawkins really didn’t have to say anything at all. If she really needed an answer from him, she probably would have asked it in a private email.
Because it’s every bit as relevant over here, crossposted from PZ’s.
OK, the simple version.
If you are forcing someone else to do it or telling someone else to do it’s monstrous at worst and rude at best.
If you are choosing to do it, it’s no one business but yours in terms of personal autonomy (hypothetically, just look at birth control), but freeze peach lets them be rude and we get to be rude back.
If you are a person that does not want the “burden” of social responsibility of someone you have one moral and ethical option and that is to fight for more science and medicine research. It would be nice if we could swap out genes, control regions, target extra copies of chromosomes for careful destruction, remodel white-matter pathways and ganglia, and more than we can possibly imagine with full consent and moral and ethical considerations.
The other way is to be rude, lazy, and frankly selfish.
Nihil de nobis, sine nobis.
so say all people who are entirely clueless about the fact they just lost an argument.
Katherine Woo
Ohai irony. You’re the one explicitly taking notice of and commenting on every use of the word.
Kevin Kehres
Yes. Because he knows fuck all about her life and her situation and her means for caring for this hypothetical child, etc. etc. That is, of course, apart from the fact that he wasn’t asked a damn thing. Someone observed that they were unsure what they’d do and he responded with an imperative statement.
From today’s Daily Mash: Dawkins now just telling random strangers why he hates them.
Dunc @ 46
Richard Dawkins = Bowerick Wowbagger confirmed.
On the one side you would be consigning another human being to a life where it can never achieve the mental faculties you and your spouse enjoy
So? i don’t have the mental faculties of Einstein or of Vishwanthan Anand – it doesn’t reduce my appreciation of my life or of physics or of chess.
I don’t sit around, thinking, ‘I have the capacity to read!’
Perhaps – but who among us hasnt had thoughts of the type “I wish I could write like that , run like that, play like that, act like that…”
where the person would not be able to contribute to maintenance or progress in the human condition most likely.
And your contributions are?
It is not supportable in my view to weigh that against a spouse’s hypothetical, and yes it is hypothetical unless you have the abortion
I said it wasn’t a hypothetical because we already had the discussion for our child (you should also note that devastation is short form for possible depression which is also short form for possible harm in various ways including suicide)
So you are asking me to evaluate possible harm v/s possible reduced mental faculties in various ways. You and I might have different answers , but it doesn’t mean one of them is immoral and it doesn’t mean your answer applies to me –
Katherine @ 37 –
Now that’s just silly. Surely you’re not assuming that Chomsky never says “fuck” or its cognates in conversation?
Have you never heard of code-switching? Naturally ML King didn’t use “fuck” as part of his sermons or public addresses, but that doesn’t mean he never used it at all.
This here? This is a conversation. The rules are different from the rules for magazines, which in turn are different from rules for academic publication. And in fact even those rules have changed over time. Used to be, you would never see “fuck” in the New Yorker. That’s no longer the case.
Cuss word controversy? It’s interesting. This is what I posted on my Facebook wall when I started the conversation on Ferguson.
And just as I thought my father and grandfather completely ignored the true obscenity in my words and in my link and completely focused on the presence of four letters with literally no meaning but one socially programmed in. Profanity is a social tool, with a somewhat uncertain shape. I think that everyone that complains about the presence of profanity has to demonstrate that the person using the profanity is letting that profanity alter their arguments in a bad way. Profanity is a “dogwhistle”, but social as well as political.
Some things are worth pushing strong social buttons for and at some point when someone lets the presence of a “strong word” distract them from a significant thing it becomes very apparent that they are avoiding something. At that point I get to find out how and why.