In a recent interview with Irish radio host Brendan O’Connor, who has a daughter with Down’s syndrome, the geneticist Richard Dawkins said it is “wise and sensible” to abort babies who have either Down’s syndrome or are deaf or blind in order to “increase the amount of happiness in the world.” In 2014 Dawkins told a woman who said she would face “a real ethical dilemma” if she became pregnant with a baby with Down’s syndrome, “Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have a choice.”
In 2014 Dawkins explained his thinking: “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.” When Brendan O’Connor pressed him, he said he didn’t know for certain that disabled people increase suffering and there is no direct evidence. He also admitted he didn’t know intimately anyone with Down’s syndrome.
The nihilist philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, who said “God is dead”, understood the implications of this statement, “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.” Nihilism is a philosophy that denies the existence of genuine moral truths and asserts the ultimate meaninglessness of life or of the universe. Such thinking does not “increase the sum of happiness” but is a counsel of despair.
Heidi Crowter is a wonderful example of how people with Down’s syndrome enrich all our lives. After she was born, Heidi was diagnosed with leukaemia, pneumonia, kidney failure and needed open-heart surgery. Heidi left school with GCSEs and, until lockdown, worked at Raspberry Kids Hair Salon in Coventry. In July 2020, when she was 24, she married James. They are both Christians. Heidi is proud of all she has achieved and laughingly says, “My mum didn’t think I’d get married – well boy, didn’t I blow that out the window.”
On 6 and 7 July, Heidi is going to the High Court in London to attempt to change the law surrounding the abortion of babies with Down’s syndrome. Heidi was devastated when she learned that 90% of women whose unborn children are diagnosed with Down’s terminate their pregnancies. Under the present law such pregnancies can be terminated up to birth. Heidi says, “I just want people to see that we’re the same as everyone else.”
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