Sarah Palin takes on Richard Dawkins over remarks about aborting children with Down Syndrome. Update!

Palin posted the above graphic and then followed it up with this: 

Mr. Dawkins, I'd let you meet my son if you promised to open your mind, your eyes, and your heart to a unique kind of absolute beauty. But, in my request for you to be tolerant, I’d have to warn Trig he must be tolerant, too, because he may superficially look at you as kind of awkward. I'll make sure he's polite, though! 

Love, 

Sarah Palin & family

On the face of it one would think that Palin is in the right in this confrontation of Dawkins. 

And in some ways she might be.

However what has to be remembered is that Dawkins is a scientist and his thinking is purely logical.

Which he attempted to explain in several tweets following the dust up on Twitter:

I do not for one moment apologise for approaching moral philosophic questions in a logical way. There's a place for emotion & this isn't it.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 20, 2014

A woman whom I know & like said she'd be uncertain what to do if pregnant with Downs. I said what I'd do & why. Happens to be what most do.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 20, 2014

If I were a woman with a DS fetus I personally would abort. So do most women in fact. If you wouldn't, good luck to you, it's your decision,
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 20, 2014

Down Syndrome screening is not eugenic: DS has extremely low heritability. Screening offers a humane moral choice. Majority choose abortion.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 21, 2014

Professor Dawkins made a few rather unfortunate errors.

One is in forgetting that the things he tweets will be seen by EVERYBODY, and not simply the person to whom he is responding.

And the second was in not taking into consideration how the incredibly irrational anti-abortion groups would be in response to his advice.

Now the difference between Dawkins and Palin is that Dawkins is being completely truthful in his response, and she is simply seizing on this as a way to insert herself into a conversation that has nothing to do with her personally and to also kinda play the victim while utilizing on of her favorite props.

My take is that Dawkins should have expressed his feelings in an e-mail instead of on Twitter.

However as somebody who has worked with children who have Downs I can certainly attest to the challenges that they face, the incredible strain on their families, and that I have heard more than one exhausted parent sobbing that if they had it all to do over, they might have chosen not to bring this particular child into the world.

There are many wonderful success stories of children with Down syndrome succeeding belong all expectations. But for every one of those there  are about a hundred others where there was no fairy tale ending, and their lives have been rife with medical problems, frustrating disabilities, and despair.

Those are just the facts, and Richard Dawkins is obviously well aware of them.

Update: It looks like this is going to be a family affair: 

Did you guys see this? Richard Dawkins, probably the worlds’ most famous and influential atheist, just told a woman that it was “immoral” to give birth to a baby with Down’s Syndrome. 

Immoral for my Mom not to kill her own son? 

I’ll make this simple: We love Trig. He brings us joy, and I know that he has a joyful life. 

Do you think the fact that they keep hammering home that "immoral" word is a sly shot at little ole me?