What of Dawkins and his pro-abortion views?

Richard Dawkins has made quite a name for himself in popular media. He has his own twitter account and frequently interacts with people in academia (like Daniel Dennett) and ordinary folks from different walks of life.

Well recently Dawkins made a rather interesting howbeit disturbing comment that I think captures his real views on why he thinks abortion is morally permissible. On his twitter account Dawkins, while interacting with a woman about what should be done for unborn children (I’m using ‘children’ because I’m pro-life) who have Down’s Syndrome, made the following statement: “Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.”

Now there are a few problems going on here with Dawkins’ reasoning about abortion. First, Dawkins seems to think that there is a morally relevant difference between killing a fetus that has Down’s syndrome and bringing it into the world. Killing the fetus is a morally superior choice than a mother giving birth to it. This is inevitably linked to the idea that the capacity to experience pain and pleasure is the measuring line that determines who qualifies as a person and who doesn’t. Since if a fetus was born and became a newborn and had Down’s syndrome, it would face a life of suffering, potential ostracism, and several obstacles to growth and development in cognitive, social, emotional, and perhaps physical areas of life.

Now let’s pause for a moment before I continue. Clearly most of us – pro-life and pro-choice – probably feel for kids who have Down’s syndrome and don’t like it when they experience more difficulties in life than most of us will see. So we obviously value those kids. But the problem with Dawkin’s first assumption is that the capacity to feel pain and pleasure insofar of what we should be aware of - when we think of certain decisions as being moral and immoral – is then taken to be the very factor that makes abortion morally justified. Because the fetus apparently can’t feel its limbs being ripped off its body, it’s not being harmed. Well, gee, I can think of one counter-example to this claim. What if we gave a girl a strong dose of some medication that completely numbed her body and then we took a chainsaw and amputated her legs and arms? Would that be wrong? Well not according to how Dawkins reasons here. It’s the very absence of the present ability to feel pain and suffering that entails that the person being harmed is in fact not being harmed.

Now someone might object to what I just said in the following way: “That girl at one time was able to experience pain and suffering and even though she did not feel her legs and arms being chopped off with the chainsaw, she was still harmed and the perpetrators should be punished.” I wholeheartedly agree with this response but it does not help the pro-choice advocate in his or her case. Why? Because the pro-choice advocate is implicitly admitting that something other than the presence of self-awareness is doing the work of making her a person worthy of protection. It cannot be the mere present capacity to experience pain and suffering that makes her a moral subject because that ability has been taken away for awhile. So what is it? Is it her past experiences of experiencing pain and pleasure? Let’s change the story a bit. What if the perpetrators gave her the numbing medication and additionally gave her a pill that sent her into a coma that lasted for a few years. And suppose when she comes out of the coma, she has lost nearly all of her past memories including the tragedy that happened to her. What then?

It cannot be the present capacity to feel pain, pleasure, and suffering or to have memories of one’s past that makes her a person. So what is it? If someone wants to say that she still had a past even though her memories are completely disconnected from it, then they are borrowing from the pro-life’s resources. Something other than memories and experiences of pain and pleasure is doing the work in what would condemn the perpetrators’ actions against that girl.

But moreover, there’s a second problem lurking beneath Dawkins’ train of thought that I think deserves some attention. It’s a little subtler but I think it’s worth exploring. Dawkins says that it would be immoral, assuming the mother had the power to decide one way or the other, for her to bring the child into the world with the condition it had prior to birth. To borrow an idea from philosopher Francis Beckwith, suppose the mother was able to get an operation done on the fetus with Down’s syndrome so that it would lack the brain development that would cause it to later on experience suffering. But tweaking with the fetus’s brain would also cause it to never experience joy, pleasure, happiness, love, and many other things. Would that have been a wrong decision on the mother’s behalf?

If you’re pro-choice and support a mother’s decision to abort the fetus at least because the fetus can’t feel pain at that stage of development and hence it’s not being harmed, then you must believe that it’s morally permissible for a doctor to alter the fetus’s brain at that point so that it will never experience pain, pleasure, happiness, or even a future. Because, you’re not depriving the fetus of anything right? It hasn’t been harmed because it doesn’t desire not to be harmed. If it doesn’t desire not to be harmed, then it doesn’t have a right not to be harmed. End of story.

So Dawkins, by his own pro-choice reasoning, cannot object to the scenario I just pictured because on his own view of personhood, no one is harmed by abortion and by being deprived of future suffering and pleasure.

Now someone might object to my illustration by suggesting that if a mother wanted her potential baby to experience a future with goodness and happiness, then it would be wrong to abort the fetus before it reaches that stage. So insofar as the mother desires that kind of life for that fetus, whatever the mother desires for that fetus is the appropriate mode of action to take. There are several problems with this. First of all, it cannot justify why it would be good for a mother to choose a life of pleasure and happiness for her future baby and yet wrong for the same mother at a later time to change her mind or for an entirely different mother to deliberately give birth to her future baby so that it will experience pain and suffering. Who has done the right thing in those cases?

If you say what’s right depends on what the mother perceives and desires, then it follows there is no morally relevant difference between a mother choosing happiness for her future baby and another mother choosing a life of misery and suffering for her baby. But this is absurd. Just because two mothers might choose different courses of actions does not entail that they are morally equivalent actions.

Second, it renders the even more absurd idea that killing someone prior to birth in order to spare them from future suffering is somehow a better choice than giving birth to them and loving them through their suffering. Why is this absurd? Because it assumes without justification that the unborn are not human beings with a right to life. If we have seven 6 year olds inflicted with an incurable disease and decide to kill them immediately so that they will not suffer another 2 weeks of suffering, is that morally wrong? Well yes it would be wrong. It is wrong to kill someone ahead of time so that he or she won’t have to experience more suffering.

So these are my thoughts on Richard Dawkins and his comments on abortion.