Author and atheist extraordinaire Richard Dawkins tweeted himself into a morally relativistic corner last week.

In a Twitter debate with a woman over abortion, she brought up the tough case of deciding whether to give birth to a baby diagnosed with Down syndrome. Dawkins replied, “Abort the baby and try again,” adding, “It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.”

When queried whether that view held if the baby had autism, Dawkins replied, “People on that spectrum have a great deal to contribute, maybe even an enhanced ability in some respects. DS not enhanced.” In Dawkins’ Godless universe, a baby is only worthy of being born if he or she will “contribute” to society.

Dawkins is often accused of courting controversy, yet after these tweets were shared, he was overcome by a tsunami of negative responses. His increasingly lengthy responses revealed an increasing desperation to quell what he called a “feeding frenzy.”

He first countered with an offensive stance, tweeting, “Apparently I’m a horrid monster for recommending what actually happens to the great majority of Down syndrome fetuses. They are aborted.”  Dawkins attempts to justify his view by claiming his is a majority opinion. With the abortion rate of unborn babies with Down syndrome as high as 93% in the United States and Europe, the professor indeed holds the popular opinion. Siding with the majority is safe? Society has never been wrong on a moral issue, like, say, slavery or the Holocaust?

Dawkins next lashed out against the “haters” in a personal attack on his site, “Letting Slip the Dogs of Twitterwar,” blaming them for overreacting.

“My phraseology may have been tactlessly vulnerable to misunderstanding, but I can’t help feeling that at least half the problem lies in a wanton eagerness to misunderstand,” he said.

He belittled his detractors, relegating them to the following categories of hopelessly biased individuals:

• those who are against abortion under any circumstances;
• those who thought he was telling women what to do with their own bodies;
• those who accused him of “advocating a mob rule” or “eugenic policy”; and, finally,
• those who felt stirred by an “emotional point” because they love a person with Down syndrome.

Apparently, none of those who objected to his words occupied the objective high ground he claimed, lecturing in a professorial tone: “I have sympathy for this emotional point, but it is an emotional one, not a logical one. … It is one of a common family of errors, one that frequently arises in the abortion debate.”

His contemptuous retort only stoked the fires, with repartees from all sides. Dawkins pleaded ignorance, saying he only intended his tweet to go out to the woman who tweeted him and their mutual followers. He has far too much experience on Twitter for this to be credible, with 17K tweets. On his website, he issued this statement,

“Here is what I would have said in my reply to this woman, given more than 140 characters: ‘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. And, indeed, that is what the great majority of women, in America and especially in Europe, actually do. 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.’”

For a self-styled devout atheist like Dawkins, the idea of a creator who decides what is moral is ridiculous. Therefore, Dawkins’ facile assumption of the authority to select another moral code, based upon the supreme importance of happiness, is hypocritical. Yet it is widely used by the proponents of everything from abortion to physician-assisted suicide, those who, like Dawkins, have no qualms against playing God.

Jamie Edgin, professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, and Fabian Fernandez, research assistant at Johns Hopkins University, wrote a rebuttal to Dawkins’ poorly formed opinion using hard science in The New York Times entitled “The Truth About Down Syndrome,” in which they conclude:

“The data indicate that people with Down syndrome, and the families who care for them, suffer less than might be supposed. And where Down syndrome does pose undoubted challenges, research into treatment options suggests that there are grounds for cautious optimism.” According to the latest medical research, we are at a turning point for those with Down syndrome, but Dawkins doesn’t know that.”

Had Dawkins met with those researchers or interviewed the people with Down syndrome and their families, as Dr. Brian Skotko of Massachusetts General Hospital has, he might have a less-biased, more-informed opinion. In Skotko’s 2011 survey of 300 families, 99% responded that they are happy with their son or daughter with Down syndrome, and 99% of those with Down syndrome 12 years or older reported being happy with their lives. Try and find a group of young adults of any demographic with such a percentage of happiness!

Dawkins’ doubling and tripling down on his disdain for women who give birth to babies with Down syndrome proves that when one no longer believes in a Supreme Being who gives dignity to each human life, he will forever struggle to plant the flag of his personal morality on the shifting sands of public opinion, bigotry and ignorance. His voice will sound increasingly shrill as he insists on the superiority of his opinion.

Leticia Velazsquez has three daughters, one of whom has Down syndrome. She is the author of A Special Mother Is Born. She blogs at CatholicMom.com.