Nearly 90% of unborn babies prenatally diagnosed with Down’s syndrome in England and Wales (and Crown Dependencies) were aborted in 2021, according to official data released last month. These statistics were published on the day preceding the UK’s four-day Easter weekend, deliberately, it appears, to bury 973 victims whose deaths were assented to by the state—the PR equivalent of scattering twigs and leaves over a shallow grave.
Every year, thousands of unborn children considered undesirable are made to disappear around Europe. A study published in 2021 estimated that there were 9,300 fewer people born with Down’s syndrome annually in Europe between 2011 and 2015 because of abortion, a reduction rate of over 50%. In total, abortion accounted for approximately 155,000 missing people with Down’s syndrome who’d otherwise be alive in 2015. That figure has surely risen.
The proliferation of abortion and non-invasive prenatal testing has wiped out much of the Down’s syndrome population in recent years. In the age of identity, when so-called ‘victimised’ groups gain special protections from the state and a culture that elevates minorities over the majority, the singling out of unborn children with disabilities is accepted and encouraged.
Parents in the UK are especially aware of this glaring contradiction. Emma Mellor, for example, was pressured 15 times to abort her daughter Jamie following a 20-week scan that found fluid on her brain. When a test at 38 weeks confirmed Down’s syndrome, Jamie’s parents were reminded once more that they could abort her until the point of birth. Doctors implored them to think about the effect the birth of a child with Down’s syndrome would have on their other child’s quality of life.
Another mother, Natalie O’Rourke, also from the UK, was booked in for an abortion before she was even told that her son had Down’s syndrome. Despite telling doctors that she didn’t want to abort her son, they kept the time slot free just in case she changed her mind. “In their eyes, he was going to be a drain on society and his life would have no value,” said O’Rourke.
This ‘screening’ out of lebensunwertes leben (life unworthy of life) isn’t without precedent in history. A total of 300,000 people, including 8,000 children with physical and mental disabilities like Down’s syndrome, were exterminated by Nazi Germany’s Aktion T4 programme between 1939 and 1945. While the targeting of unborn children with Down’s syndrome today might seem more subtle and less systematic, the effect is much the same. Additionally, 108 babies with a cleft lip/palate and 53 with club feet were also aborted in England and Wales (and Crown Dependencies) in 2021.
The eradication of nine-tenths of a specific group of people presumed to be undesirable needn’t be state policy when so many doctors have themselves institutionalised it, which increasingly appears to be the case. Many parents ultimately relent under such pressure that feeds on their natural anxieties, made worse when medics advance abortion as the only reasonable solution to their ‘problem child.’ The very existence of a legal provision granting parents a right to abort a disabled child up until birth also encourages the view that lives affected by disability are less worthy of living.
The state’s urge to offer this ‘right’ in the UK is such that the National Health Service (NHS) offers parents an invasive test that, in borderline cases, is more likely to kill their baby than diagnose Down’s syndrome. If an initial 12-week screening for Down’s syndrome reports a 1 in 2 to 1 in 150 “higher chance” of Down’s syndrome, parents may choose either a blood test (NIPT) or a more accurate but invasive diagnostic (a CVS or amniocentesis) that extracts a sample of cells from the amniotic fluid surrounding the unborn baby; this latter test is associated with a 1% risk of miscarriage. Parents who are already in a high state of anxiety are burdened even more by having to decide whether an invasive test is worth the risk.
This prejudicial test for a chromosomal disorder more common than red hair has the effect of likening Down’s syndrome to a chronic disease akin to diabetes or cancer. While the condition has its challenges, the fear that is enabled by testing has led to the view that it is “immoral” not to abort such a child, as the noted ethologist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has suggested.
It isn’t so surprising, then, that the NHS was ordered to pay compensation in 2019 to parents after it failed to test their child for Down’s syndrome. While the judge said that his verdict should not be viewed “as suggesting that the birth of a child with Down’s syndrome must be seen as unwelcome,” he nonetheless concluded that the “fear that she [the mother] might be carrying a child with Down’s syndrome would, at least for her, have tipped the balance.”
There has been some pushback against sex-selective abortion in the last few years. Campaigner Heidi Crowter, who has Down’s syndrome, launched legal challenges on the grounds that such abortions are discriminatory and incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). However, her latest bid was rejected by the Court of Appeal in November 2022 because the current abortion law did not breach the rights of the “living disabled.” “We live in a society where disabled people are valued equally after birth but not in the womb,” Crowter stated. She now plans to appeal directly to the ECHR.
At the time of writing, Sir Liam Fox MP, the former secretary of state for defence, is seeking an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill that would stop the abortion of babies diagnosed with Down’s syndrome past 24 weeks. Although Fox’s proposal has gained cross-party support from around 40 MPs, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has so far distanced himself from the amendment. More positively, Dr. Fox also sponsored the Down’s Syndrome Act 2022, which at least recognised the status of people like Crowter as belonging to a minority group. The state is now required to make provisions for the needs of some 40,000 citizens with Down’s syndrome in the UK, many of whom will outlive their parents. Unfortunately, the Act does not apply to unborn children.
A schizophrenic mania is at large in the West that claims to cherish and protect vulnerable individuals and groups while at the same time killing many of them behind the closed doors of the home and clinic. Unborn babies with Down’s syndrome, like thousands of others who simply aren’t wanted, have been sacrificed on the altar of women’s ‘choice.’ This article of modern faith that takes precedence over all other rights, not least the right to life, seems to be founded on nothing else but a vulgar will to power that wields such words as ‘rights’ and ‘equality’ to suit its own ends.
Tragically, the only equality today for thousands of disabled babies denied life is to be found in death. As Charles de Gaulle remarked to his wife on the death of their 20-year-old daughter, Anne, with Down’s syndrome, “Now, she is like the others.” But de Gaulle cherished his daughter in life and protected her as if he had been defending the honour of France, which was likely the same for a man like de Gaulle.
Despite the challenges that Anne’s condition posed to her family, who refused to send her away to an asylum (as had been common in the 20th century), De Gaulle considered her a “grace … [and] my joy, she helps me to look beyond all the failures and honours, and always to look higher.” One of the great tragedies of abortion is that it denies so many families exactly that grace that made even a stoic man like de Gaulle into a doting father whose love answered his daughter’s call, and he was made all the better for it. It’s a measure of their bond that the only word Anne could say clearly was “Papa.”
While de Gaulle and Anne are buried together, as the General had wished, in Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, thousands of people with Down’s syndrome have no grave. Nations like France built giant memorials of stone to honour the missing at Verdun and the Somme; yet there are no such markers for Europe’s Down’s syndrome dead. By making sure these children remain unborn and nameless, some Europeans might also believe that they can bury the shame of abortion. They hope the rest of us won’t notice. To lament the dead, after all, we must first recognise that they existed at all. Will we?
Europe’s Missing Children
Photo by Omar Lopez on Unsplash
Nearly 90% of unborn babies prenatally diagnosed with Down’s syndrome in England and Wales (and Crown Dependencies) were aborted in 2021, according to official data released last month. These statistics were published on the day preceding the UK’s four-day Easter weekend, deliberately, it appears, to bury 973 victims whose deaths were assented to by the state—the PR equivalent of scattering twigs and leaves over a shallow grave.
Every year, thousands of unborn children considered undesirable are made to disappear around Europe. A study published in 2021 estimated that there were 9,300 fewer people born with Down’s syndrome annually in Europe between 2011 and 2015 because of abortion, a reduction rate of over 50%. In total, abortion accounted for approximately 155,000 missing people with Down’s syndrome who’d otherwise be alive in 2015. That figure has surely risen.
The proliferation of abortion and non-invasive prenatal testing has wiped out much of the Down’s syndrome population in recent years. In the age of identity, when so-called ‘victimised’ groups gain special protections from the state and a culture that elevates minorities over the majority, the singling out of unborn children with disabilities is accepted and encouraged.
Parents in the UK are especially aware of this glaring contradiction. Emma Mellor, for example, was pressured 15 times to abort her daughter Jamie following a 20-week scan that found fluid on her brain. When a test at 38 weeks confirmed Down’s syndrome, Jamie’s parents were reminded once more that they could abort her until the point of birth. Doctors implored them to think about the effect the birth of a child with Down’s syndrome would have on their other child’s quality of life.
Another mother, Natalie O’Rourke, also from the UK, was booked in for an abortion before she was even told that her son had Down’s syndrome. Despite telling doctors that she didn’t want to abort her son, they kept the time slot free just in case she changed her mind. “In their eyes, he was going to be a drain on society and his life would have no value,” said O’Rourke.
This ‘screening’ out of lebensunwertes leben (life unworthy of life) isn’t without precedent in history. A total of 300,000 people, including 8,000 children with physical and mental disabilities like Down’s syndrome, were exterminated by Nazi Germany’s Aktion T4 programme between 1939 and 1945. While the targeting of unborn children with Down’s syndrome today might seem more subtle and less systematic, the effect is much the same. Additionally, 108 babies with a cleft lip/palate and 53 with club feet were also aborted in England and Wales (and Crown Dependencies) in 2021.
The eradication of nine-tenths of a specific group of people presumed to be undesirable needn’t be state policy when so many doctors have themselves institutionalised it, which increasingly appears to be the case. Many parents ultimately relent under such pressure that feeds on their natural anxieties, made worse when medics advance abortion as the only reasonable solution to their ‘problem child.’ The very existence of a legal provision granting parents a right to abort a disabled child up until birth also encourages the view that lives affected by disability are less worthy of living.
The state’s urge to offer this ‘right’ in the UK is such that the National Health Service (NHS) offers parents an invasive test that, in borderline cases, is more likely to kill their baby than diagnose Down’s syndrome. If an initial 12-week screening for Down’s syndrome reports a 1 in 2 to 1 in 150 “higher chance” of Down’s syndrome, parents may choose either a blood test (NIPT) or a more accurate but invasive diagnostic (a CVS or amniocentesis) that extracts a sample of cells from the amniotic fluid surrounding the unborn baby; this latter test is associated with a 1% risk of miscarriage. Parents who are already in a high state of anxiety are burdened even more by having to decide whether an invasive test is worth the risk.
This prejudicial test for a chromosomal disorder more common than red hair has the effect of likening Down’s syndrome to a chronic disease akin to diabetes or cancer. While the condition has its challenges, the fear that is enabled by testing has led to the view that it is “immoral” not to abort such a child, as the noted ethologist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has suggested.
It isn’t so surprising, then, that the NHS was ordered to pay compensation in 2019 to parents after it failed to test their child for Down’s syndrome. While the judge said that his verdict should not be viewed “as suggesting that the birth of a child with Down’s syndrome must be seen as unwelcome,” he nonetheless concluded that the “fear that she [the mother] might be carrying a child with Down’s syndrome would, at least for her, have tipped the balance.”
There has been some pushback against sex-selective abortion in the last few years. Campaigner Heidi Crowter, who has Down’s syndrome, launched legal challenges on the grounds that such abortions are discriminatory and incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). However, her latest bid was rejected by the Court of Appeal in November 2022 because the current abortion law did not breach the rights of the “living disabled.” “We live in a society where disabled people are valued equally after birth but not in the womb,” Crowter stated. She now plans to appeal directly to the ECHR.
At the time of writing, Sir Liam Fox MP, the former secretary of state for defence, is seeking an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill that would stop the abortion of babies diagnosed with Down’s syndrome past 24 weeks. Although Fox’s proposal has gained cross-party support from around 40 MPs, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has so far distanced himself from the amendment. More positively, Dr. Fox also sponsored the Down’s Syndrome Act 2022, which at least recognised the status of people like Crowter as belonging to a minority group. The state is now required to make provisions for the needs of some 40,000 citizens with Down’s syndrome in the UK, many of whom will outlive their parents. Unfortunately, the Act does not apply to unborn children.
A schizophrenic mania is at large in the West that claims to cherish and protect vulnerable individuals and groups while at the same time killing many of them behind the closed doors of the home and clinic. Unborn babies with Down’s syndrome, like thousands of others who simply aren’t wanted, have been sacrificed on the altar of women’s ‘choice.’ This article of modern faith that takes precedence over all other rights, not least the right to life, seems to be founded on nothing else but a vulgar will to power that wields such words as ‘rights’ and ‘equality’ to suit its own ends.
Tragically, the only equality today for thousands of disabled babies denied life is to be found in death. As Charles de Gaulle remarked to his wife on the death of their 20-year-old daughter, Anne, with Down’s syndrome, “Now, she is like the others.” But de Gaulle cherished his daughter in life and protected her as if he had been defending the honour of France, which was likely the same for a man like de Gaulle.
Despite the challenges that Anne’s condition posed to her family, who refused to send her away to an asylum (as had been common in the 20th century), De Gaulle considered her a “grace … [and] my joy, she helps me to look beyond all the failures and honours, and always to look higher.” One of the great tragedies of abortion is that it denies so many families exactly that grace that made even a stoic man like de Gaulle into a doting father whose love answered his daughter’s call, and he was made all the better for it. It’s a measure of their bond that the only word Anne could say clearly was “Papa.”
While de Gaulle and Anne are buried together, as the General had wished, in Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, thousands of people with Down’s syndrome have no grave. Nations like France built giant memorials of stone to honour the missing at Verdun and the Somme; yet there are no such markers for Europe’s Down’s syndrome dead. By making sure these children remain unborn and nameless, some Europeans might also believe that they can bury the shame of abortion. They hope the rest of us won’t notice. To lament the dead, after all, we must first recognise that they existed at all. Will we?
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