A lengthy new piece in The Atlantic explores the troubling matter of why so few children with Down syndrome are being born across the world.
And while the headline claimed prenatal testing “is changing who gets born and who doesn’t,” the problem is much more horrific than what it describes. It’s not just that babies with Down syndrome are not being born; they are being killed in the womb in abortions.
Writer Sarah Zhan focused on Denmark where 95 percent of unborn babies diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted. Since prenatal testing became widely available in Denmark, she said “the number of children born with Down syndrome has fallen sharply.”
“Few people speak publicly about wanting to ‘eliminate’ Down syndrome. Yet individual choices are adding up to something very close to that,” Zhang wrote.
Abortion, as many pro-lifers emphasize, has become a modern means of eugenics, the targeting of “less fit” human beings for extermination. The founders of Planned Parenthood and Marie Stopes International, two of the largest abortion groups in the world, both were well-known eugenicists who believed in forced sterilization, called people “weeds” and opposed interracial marriage, among other things. Essentially, they believe some human beings are more valuable than others.
Today, the abortion industry makes billions of dollars every year aborting millions of unborn babies – many of them the children of poor and minority women or children diagnosed with disabilities like Down syndrome.
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Zhang linked abortion and eugenics in her report and even noted how the dangerous philosophy led to horrific human rights abuses including forced sterilizations and the mass slaughter of people with disabilities in Nazi Germany.
Today, these eugenic-based human rights violations continue through abortion – and the people who frequently are targeted for abortions know it.
One of the most heart-wrenching parts of Zhang’s report was her interaction with Karl Emil, the 18-year-old son of Denmark’s National Down Syndrome Association head Grete Fält-Hansen.
Zhang described how the friendly, outgoing young man quickly became despondent when he was reminded that so many children like him are aborted.
According to the report:
At one point, Grete was reminded of a documentary that had sparked an outcry in Denmark. She reclaimed her phone to look up the title: Død Over Downs (“Death to Down Syndrome”). When Karl Emil read over her shoulder, his face crumpled. He curled into the corner and refused to look at us. He had understood, obviously, and the distress was plain on his face.
Grete looked up at me: “He reacts because he can read.”
“He must be aware of the debate?” I asked, which felt perverse to even say. So he’s aware there are people who don’t want people like him to be born? Yes, she said …
The decisions parents make after prenatal testing are private and individual ones. But when the decisions so overwhelmingly swing one way—to abort—it does seem to reflect something more: an entire society’s judgment about the lives of people with Down syndrome. That’s what I saw reflected in Karl Emil’s face.
However, Grete also told Zhang that she fully supports “a woman’s right to choose.” Unlike her son, she apparently does not recognize how abortion is a horrific, deadly devaluation of human beings.
Fox News reports some pro-life advocates criticized The Atlantic article justifying killing unborn babies with disabilities in abortions.
“Everyone who works there should be ashamed,” NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck responded. He said the magazine cheered eugenics “and the murder of people with Down Syndrome, simply because of who God created them to be.”
Down syndrome discrimination is a problem across the world, and it begins before birth.
One mom recently told the BBC that she was pressured to abort her unborn daughter 15 times, including right up to the moment of her baby’s birth. Another mother from Brooklyn, New York said doctors tried to convince her to abort her unborn son for weeks before they took no for an answer.
A recent study highlighted in Scientific American found evidence that families of children with Down syndrome often face negative, biased counseling and pressure to have abortions.
The abortion rates for unborn babies with Down syndrome are extremely high. Several years ago, a CBS News report shocked the nation with its exposure of the discriminatory trend. According to the report, nearly 100 percent of unborn babies who test positive for Down syndrome are aborted in Iceland. The rate in France was 77 percent in 2015, 90 percent in the UK and 67 percent in the United States.
