Love, Morality, and Dawkins

I've talked a bit about the idea that love is the commandment that drives all others, and I'll certainly come back to that more later, but the comments by Richard Dawkins of late seem to necessitate a response.

From The Independent article on what he said,

“I honestly don't know what I would do if I were pregnant with a kid with Down Syndrome. Real ethical dilemma,” @InYourFaceNYer chimed in.
“Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice,” he tweeted back

Dawkins further fueled the fire with comments later:

"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."  (Link)

What he's saying here, then, is that he believes children with Down Syndrome are suffering and unhappy, or perhaps bring suffering and unhappiness to others (e.g. through increased financial and temporal costs for care).  Amy Julia Becker wrote an account of her own experiences raising a child with Down Syndrome, noticing the same idea in society:

In other words, across the media landscape, children and adults who are going to work, interacting with their parents, experiencing the typical joys and sorrows of life, are nevertheless in a perpetual state of "suffering."

The fact of the matter is that children who have Down Syndrome are happier than the rest of us. Jevan (last name unknown) from The Tribal Way wrote a blog on this topic that did an excellent job collating the research on Down Syndrome and happiness.  He writes:

Findings from a study published in the American Journal of Medical Genetics surveyed 284 people with Down syndrome ..the results were as follows...

"The average age was 23, and 84 percent were living with one or both parents/guardians. The findings:

• 99 percent said they were happy with their lives
• 97 percent liked who they are
• 96 percent liked how they look
• 86 percent indicated they could make friends easily
• 4 percent expressed sadness about their life."

So the children themselves are happier; even happier, he notes, than the rich (and I've already provided links about their happiness in my blog on poverty).  If our defining characteristic of whether or not babies should be aborted based on the perceived suffering they will endure for the rest of their lives, it seems the rest of us should be aborted, and children with Down Syndrome are the only ones who should be living.

But what about the second possibility, that they bring suffering and unhappiness to others?  Fortunately for me, Jevan covered that topic, too:

People with down syndrome are loved and cared for. Studies show that 79% of parents with those with down syndrome said their outlook on life had improved since having their child and that 94% of siblings of those with down children were proud of their DS brother or sister.

So, by and large, having to "suffer" through raising a child with Down Syndrome is actually good for the parents and really good for their children who don't have Down Syndrome.

Now, there are plenty of other arguments about birthing children that Dawkins wasn't making, and I'm not going to cover them here.  It is, as he notes, up to the mom, and any mom who doesn't feel up to the task or doesn't feel she can provide the love and support a given child's needs must figure out for herself whether or not to have an abortion.  For my own part, though, I think kids with Down Syndrome are awesome, even if I, too, suffer from societal judgmentalism regarding them (another prejudice I'm trying to work out of my mind).