Posted on 08/16/2017 9:33:56 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
CBS News reported earlier this week that Iceland is leading the world in eradicating Down syndrome births.
One might be forgiven for assuming that Iceland has developed an innovative treatment for the chromosomal disorder. It turns out Icelands solution is much simpler, and much more sinister: using prenatal testing and abortion to systematically exterminate children with Down syndrome. This isnt progress; its eugenics.
Prenatal testing is optional in Iceland, but the government mandates that doctors notify women of that option. About 85 percent of expectant mothers undergo the test, and close to 100 percent of those women choose to abort if their child is diagnosed with Down syndrome. Just two children with Down syndrome are born in Iceland each year, often as the result of faulty testing.
The CBS article does little to accord this subject the moral gravity it deserves. Other countries arent lagging too far behind in Down syndrome termination rates, the authors note casually. CBS Newss tweet promoting the story read simply: Iceland is on pace to virtually eliminate Down syndrome through abortion.
But Iceland isnt eliminating Down syndrome at all. Its eliminating people. The callous tone of the piece makes selective abortion sound like a technological innovation rather than what it really is: the intentional targeting of unfit persons for total elimination.
What kind of culture does it require to foster such a mindset, to foster a society in which nearly every mother of a Down-syndrome child chooses to abort? Iceland is at the high end of the spectrum in this regard and was one of the first countries to normalize widespread prenatal testing, in an effort to identify fetal abnormalities and eliminate them through abortion but it is far from alone.
Ninety percent of women in the United Kingdom who receive a positive Down-syndrome diagnosis choose to abort. In the U.S., that percentage falls somewhere between 67 and 90, according to a recent meta-study of Down-syndrome termination rates over the last few decades. In Europe as a whole, somewhere around 92 percent of babies diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted. This targeting of individuals with Down syndrome is borne out not just in astronomical abortion rates, but in a cultural attitude that often regards them as less than human.
In France, for example, the State Council banned from the airwaves a video featuring children with Down syndrome talking about their happy lives. The advertisement was meant to comfort mothers who received a prenatal diagnosis and assure them that their children would have beautiful, largely normal lives. The ad was forbidden by the French government because the smiles of the children would disturb the conscience of women who had lawfully made different personal life choices in other words, because seeing them happy would upset women who had aborted their Down syndrome children.
Meanwhile, prenatal testing is praised nearly universally for its ability to give women a full array of options for their pregnancies, but many women report feeling pressured by their doctors whether to be tested in the first place or to choose abortion if the test reveals Down syndrome or other abnormalities. It is taken for granted in the medical community that no woman would carry a Down-syndrome pregnancy to term.
This pressure reveals the pervasive belief that selective abortion is somehow an actual health-care solution. Instead of seeking real treatment for the ailments that plague people with Down syndrome, or even finding potential cures, we have settled for a false vision of progress that kills people with a disorder rather than treating them.
A counselor at an Iceland hospital sees the issue even more starkly. We dont look at abortion as a murder, she said. We look at it as a thing that we ended. We ended a possible life that may have had a huge complication . . . preventing suffering for the child and for the family. And I think that is more right than seeing it as a murder thats so black and white. Life isnt black and white. Life is grey.
Too many people today believe it is preferable, and indeed more humane, to murder children rather than allow them to suffer.
It is in this supposed gray area that the desire to promote health and well-being morphs into the insidious view that people with Down syndrome are better off dead and that we will be a more advanced society for having relieved them of the burden of a limited life. Too many people today believe it is preferable, and indeed more humane, to murder children rather than allow them to suffer. But what life doesnt have suffering?
Jerome Lejeune, the French geneticist who discovered the chromosomal basis for Down syndrome, once offered this perspective: It cannot be denied that the price of these diseases is high in suffering for the individual and in burdens for society. Not to mention what parents suffer! But we can assign a value to that price: It is precisely what a society must pay to remain fully human.
The title of the CBS piece asks, What kind of society do you want to live in? The articles implicit response seems to be, One dedicated to eliminating abnormality and suffering by any means necessary. But no admirable society eradicates suffering by eradicating those who suffer. To achieve true moral progress, we must reject the killing of the vulnerable and condemn any backwards society that promotes such a regime as a solution.
READ MORE:
The Medical Pros Are Wrong on Down Syndrome
Dear Future Mom and the Sensitivity Police
France Prepares to Criminalize Pro-Life Advocacy
Alexandra DeSanctis is a William F. Buckley Jr. Fellow in Political Journalism at the National Review Institute.
Patricia Heaton said it best. They are not eliminating Downs Syndrome, they are just killing everyone that has it.
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Democrats and the Ctrl-Left have always loved eugenics. They have not changed except in the order of steps they follow to "improve" the human race.
Yep, can’t have any of those undesirables walking around.
Eugenics and gas chambers is the answer for this..
Well, gas chamber are so passe’. Catch it early, go to PP.
Undesirables in Germany include but are not limited to:
“Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, blacks, the physically and mentally disabled, political opponents of the Nazis, including Communists and Social Democrats, dissenting clergy, resistance fighters, prisoners of war, Slavic peoples, and many individuals from the artistic communities whose opinions and works Hitler condemned.”
Undesirables in Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sangers America include but are not limited to:
feeble-minded persons, mentally disabled, diseased, blacks, unfit, immigrants and indigents “...human weeds,’ ‘reckless breeders,’ ‘spawning... human beings who never should have been born.” “exterminate the Negro population”
“no children when either mother or father suffers from such diseases as tuberculosis, gonorrhea, syphilis, cancer, epilepsy, insanity, drunkenness and mental disorders. In the case of the mother, heart disease, kidney trouble and pelvic deformities are also a serious bar to childbearing No more children should be born..,”
“progeny is tainted”, “objectionable traits”,
[ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/may/5/grossu-margaret-sanger-eugenicist/ ]
{btw, for those here on FR of a more feeble mind, this post is mostly sarcasm, at least the first section}
In 1976 my Biology Prof was promoting abortion.
I wrote in an essay test response that abortion would lead to identifying the “unfit”, and eugenics and promotion of a “master race”, and “What did we fight WWII for”?
He didn’t like it and I lost a letter grade.
I’m now retired and standing up didn’t seem to effect my career.
Folks, that is exactly what an alpha-fetoprotein test is designed to do: return iffy findings so you can be pushed into an amnio.
I refused the amniocentesis and, if I had known how this scare tactic works beforehand, I would have reused the alpha-fetoprotein as well.
There is no reason to inject this kind of anxiety into ObGyn care. If you wouldn't abort anyway, you really don't need at least half of these prenatal diagnostic, which are just the introductory phase of "search and destroy."
With this type of thinking it is only a matter of time that when people suffer head injuries, they will think it is OK to kill them too. It is another side of the NAZI Final Solution. Just determine who is undesirable and get rid of them.
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