Richard Dawkins and the Morality of Aborting a Fetus with Down Syndrome

Richard Dawkins recently tweeted the following to a woman uncertain about what to do if she carried a fetus with Down Syndrome:

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

Not surprisingly, both the bluntness and content of the tweet fomented an angry reaction. Dawkins responded in turn by softening the bluntness of the tweet:

Obviously the choice would be yours. For what it’s worth, my own choice would be to abort the Down fetus and, assuming you want a baby at all, try again. Given a free choice of having an early abortion or deliberately bringing a Down child into the world, I think the moral and sensible choice would be to abort.

Dawkins goes on to couch his opinion in the language of moral subjectivism:

I personally would go further and say that, 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 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. I agree that [this] personal opinion is contentious and needs to be argued further, possibly to be withdrawn.

This poses a difficulty: is he really a moral subjectivist (i.e. someone who asserts "what's right for me may not be right for you"), or is he making a standard utilitarian argument for the morality of aborting a fetus with Down Syndrome?

Given that he accepts a morality based on maximizing happiness and reducing suffering, I take him to be making a standard utilitarian argument:

1. We ought to minimize suffering when we can.
2. Aborting a fetus with Down Syndrome minimizes suffering.
3. Therefore, we ought to abort a fetus with DS.

The argument is logically valid, but unsound due to both premises being false. The first premise is open to standard counter-examples to utilitarianism. Minimizing suffering could entail all sorts of human rights violations, e.g., sentencing an innocent man to jail to prevent a riot, killing a few innocents in order to alleviate the suffering of many, and so on. The second premise is factually dubious. It is not at all clear that people with DS suffer more than any other demographic. People born into broken, abusive homes experience difficulties well into adulthood. People born with non-DS handicaps also face many challenges in life. It is arbitrary to single out people with DS.

I don't find the utilitarian argument convincing, but I also want to make a further claim: the fact that a fetus has DS fails as a moral justification for aborting it. Here's my argument:

1. Abortion is either morally permissible or morally impermissible.
2. If abortion is morally impermissible, then (1) a fetus having DS no more justifies killing the fetus than it does killing an infant with DS.
3. If abortion is morally permissible, then (2) a fetus having DS is a pragmatic justification for an abortion but not a moral one.
4. Therefore, either (1) or (2) is the case.
5. If either (1) or (2) is the case, a fetus having DS fails as a moral justification for aborting it.
6. Therefore, a fetus having DS fails as a moral justification for aborting it.

The reasoning behind the second premise is that if abortion is morally impermissible, then a fetus having DS no more justifies killing it than an infant having DS justifies killing the infant. Put generally, S's having DS is not a sufficient justification for killing S. On the other hand, if it is morally permissible to kill a fetus (for example, on the grounds that it, unlike, an infant is not a person), then a fetus having DS simply raises pragmatic concerns about whether the fetus should be brought to term or not.

In either case, a fetus having DS fails as a moral justification for abortion. In the first case, it fails to be a sufficient justification for abortion. In the second case, it fails to be a moral justification at all.