According to a 2013 study, almost 99 percent of people with Down syndrome report being happy with their lives; 96 percent like how they look; 97 percent like who they are. While rates of mental illness, loneliness, and chronic misery are at all-time highs across many Western countries, people with Down syndrome are a happy exception.
Despite that, babies with Down syndrome are being systematically targeted and killed in the womb specifically because they have Down syndrome. In a gut-wrenching 2018 article in The Atlantic titled “The Last Children of Down Syndrome,” some parents who chose to abort their children with Down syndrome insisted that their choice was an act of mercy.
They don’t mean for these happy people. They mean for themselves. It is pure, lethal ableism.
Every few years, there is another ugly story about the unseen and ongoing prenatal genocide of people with Down syndrome. In 2017, it was the news that Down syndrome has “almost disappeared” in Iceland. In 2019, only 18 children with Down syndrome were born. In Norway earlier this year, parents spoke out against the pressure to abort babies with a Down syndrome diagnosis.
This week, a new report indicated that Scotland has seen “a dramatic rise in abortions involving Down syndrome diagnoses, with government figures showing an 82% increase since 2021.” In 2024, 60 pre-born children with Down syndrome were aborted; in 2021, it was 33. OSV News noted that “the increase also represents a 15% rise over the 52 abortions of Down syndrome-affected unborn babies in 2023, according to statistics released by Public Health Scotland.”
According to Lynn Murray of the advocacy group Don’t Screen Us Out, the increase can be largely attributed to the roll-out of “non-invasive prenatal tests” known as NIPT, which has made it easier to detect Down syndrome.
“It is deeply concerning that despite the leaps that advocacy groups have made in raising awareness in support of people with Down’s syndrome, abortion in the case of Down’s syndrome is still so commonplace and widespread in the U.K.,” she said. “In fact, we hear from parents all the time how abortion was repeatedly presented to them in the hospital as an obvious solution following the receipt of the news that their baby had Down’s syndrome,” she added.
“We are calling on the Government to undertake an urgent inquiry to review the impact that Non-Invasive Prenatal Tests are having on the number of babies that are screened out by termination due to Down’s syndrome in Scotland each year,” Murray stated. “They then need to urgently introduce medical reforms to our screening program to ensure that this deeply disturbing increase in the number of abortions for disability is reversed.”
“We are calling on the Scottish Government to urgently update Scottish abortion legislation to ensure that babies with Down’s syndrome cannot be aborted right up to birth, as is permitted under current legislation.” OSV noted that statistics “also revealed that there were 280 abortions performed in 2024 on grounds of disability, a 26% increase from 2021 when 222 abortions were carried out for the same reason.”
In the United Kingdom, abortion is illegal after 24 weeks – unless the child is diagnosed with Down syndrome, in which case it is permitted up until birth. Healthy baby boys and girls with Down syndrome can be decapitated, dismembered, and disemboweled long past the point where they are capable of feeling excruciating pain simply because they have Down syndrome. A 2021 case against the law by a young woman with Down syndrome failed at both the High Court and the Court of Appeal.
Our collective choice to destroy children with Down syndrome says nothing about them and everything about us. As Charlotte Helen Fien once observed: “You can try to kill off everyone with Down syndrome by using abortion, but you won’t be any closer to a perfect society. You will just be closer to a cruel, heartless one.” She’s right. We’re already there.
