Down Syndrome

 

Simon Barnes—Eddie’s dad—demolishes Richard Dawkins counsel to abort children with Down Syndrome

By Dave Andrusko

Simon Barnes and his son, Eddie

We are approaching the conclusion of Down Syndrome Awareness month. The bitter irony, of course, is that the better and better the lives of children with Down syndrome are, the more and more willing we seem to be to abort these children if their condition is diagnosed prenatally.
We re-ran a story yesterday that we first posted two years ago, based on an amazing column written by Simon Barnes, a prominent British sportswriter.

I had not kept track of Barnes and his son, Eddie, until I ran across a response he’d written last month to remarks made by Richard Dawkins.
We’ve posted several times about Dawkins awful tweet. As Barnes explained, Dawkins “told a woman on Twitter that if she was knowingly pregnant with a Down’s syndrome foetus she should ‘Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have a choice.’”
Barnes correctly first addresses the “immoral” description–“a strong word,” Barnes adds. Not aborting a baby diagnosed with Down syndrome could be “immoral” on two grounds. The first is fiscal—“that it’s immoral to give birth to a child that would be a drain on national resources.”
But why stop there? If we are going to be “logical,” as Dawkins is fond of describing his inhuman and inhumane arguments, “then we need to do something about old people, about all people with serious illnesses, about all low achievers.” But, Barnes asks, why pick on kids like Eddie? “[E]ven by this argument, people with Down’s syndrome are just part of the crowd of drainers.”
Barnes reminds his readers that while Dawkins never recanted, he did backfill a bit when people were scandalized by his remarks. Dawkins shifted his emphasis to the argument that not aborting the child is “immoral from the point of view of the child’s own welfare.” Barnes responds

In other words, a foetus with Down’s syndrome is better off unborn. Logical inference: a person with Down’s syndrome is better off dead. Dawkins doesn’t know what it’s like to be dead, and he doesn’t know what it’s like to have Down’s syndrome, so I’m not convinced he has a valid argument here.

Barnes demolishes that particular fallback position, citing example after example of the full lives of people whose days, like Eddie’s, “are lit up by reciprocal affection.”

In other words, the argument that giving birth to a child with Down’s syndrome is immoral from the point of view of the individual’s welfare is a non-starter — an absurd example to choose, in fact.

Barnes then explores a final justification for aborting children with Down syndrome:” What have people with Down’s syndrome ever done for us?” Here he reaches a whole level of insight.
Barnes begins with territory unfamiliar to the Richard Dawkinses of our world: the “ever so slightly non-quantifiable”–unacceptable to Dawkins, perhaps, because he “judges everything with ruthless scientific rigour. Though that does pose the question of whether ruthless scientific rigour is the only valid way to look at the world.”
Eddie is a blessing to his family, his school mates, his teachers, pretty much everyone who comes in contact with him. He draws out something that many of us too often keep well hidden.
This capacity “will continue into adult life,” Barnes writes

Eddie will make people more generous, make them behave better towards other people with problems, make them think about such people in a better way. He will make people fractionally gentler and fractionally kinder. That doesn’t seem to me a negligible contribution to society; many people do less.

I could paraphrase Barnes’ conclusion, but that would be a huge error on my part; it would deprive you of his almost sublime eloquence.

Dawkins’s website contains a vigorous pseudonymous defence of Dawkins on Down’s. It’s written in duh! duh! logic designed to make even us stupid people grasp the subtleties of Dawkins’s argument, and makes clear that this argument stands or falls on the question of whether or not people with Down’s syndrome live in perpetual hell. And they do nothing of the kind.

Dawkins’s argument is based on an error. He hasn’t researched Down’s syndrome, he just assumed that people with the condition live in constant suffering. It’s a shame that Dawkins wasted his title ‘The God Delusion’ for his fundamentalist tract. He should have saved it for his autobiography.

But never mind him: it’s Eddie that matters here. Dawkins implies that both society and Eddie would be better if Eddie did not exist: not just Eddie but everyone else with Down’s syndrome. I disagree. So — sorry and all that — we’re going to have to face up to the gritty reality of society. If we distil every-thing that matters down to its last brutal reductionist essence, what are we left with? Eddie’s job in this world is to love and to be loved. Isn’t every-one’s? Or is love just another meme?

Source: NRLC News