What Atheism Produces

Should this Baby have been Aborted? Ask Dawkins.

Dr. Richard Dawkins, an English Professor and famous atheist recently wrote to a lady who wondered how to think about her baby that had been diagnosed in utero with Down Syndrome. 

Dawkins tweeted: "Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice."

In a fuller explanation on his website entitled Abortion & Down Syndrome: Apology for Letting Slip the Dogs of Twitterwar – the author tried to set the record straight.

He wrote: "To conclude, what I was saying simply follows logically from the ordinary pro-choice stance that most of us, I presume, espouse. My phraseology may have been tactlessly vulnerable to misunderstanding, but I can't help feeling that at least half the problem lies in a wanton eagerness to misunderstand."

The backlash for his original comment had included one mother, who has a child with the genetic condition, saying: "I would fight until my last breath for the life of my son." 

Dawkins said accusations of "Nazism, vile, monstrous fascistic callousness" and "fireballs of hatred" had been hurled his way.

He wrote: "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's 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."

The enormous ego of a person such as Dawkins leads him to conclude rationally that killing children whom you think are of little value is a gift to society and to the dead child. 

What do you think are the implications of such a point of view? How do his ideas agree with or disagree with the political issues today? 

Comments please!

Read my book, The Healing Release of the Holy Spirit for a Christian world-view. You can get an easily downloaded PDF eBook on our web page. 

Gary Sweeten