Abortion's brutal elimination of Down syndrome

You’re reading Align’s pro-life issue: our look at some of the different people and perspectives within the anti-abortion movement. Please also see our dispatches from OneLife LA and theMarch for Life; the college student’s guide to preparing for the March for Life; interviews with comedians JP Sears and Nicholas De Santo and skyscraper-scaling activist Maison DesChamps; and Robin Atkins on how to talk to pro-choice advocates.

Shane Gillis doesn't have Down syndrome, but some of his family members do. "I dodged it," the comedian jokes in his latest special, “Beautiful Dogs.” "But it nicked me. It nicked me.”

He adds that he can always tell when someone has never been around someone with Down syndrome. When he mentions his family members with the genetic disorder, they stammer their way to “Oh … are they okay? Your fam — are they doing okay?”

In 1983, the life expectancy of someone with Down syndrome was 25 years old. Forty years later, that number has risen to 60 years old. Yet the percentage of Americans with Down syndrome is declining, silently, unnaturally.

He gives a big Philly smile: “They’re doing better than everybody I know. They’re the only dudes I know having a good time pretty consistently.”

This is backed by research. A study by the American Journal of Medical Genetics determined that “nearly 99% of people with Down syndrome indicated that they were happy with their lives, 97% liked who they are, and 96% liked how they look. Nearly 99% people with DS expressed love for their families, and 97% liked their brothers and sisters. While 86% of people with DS felt they could make friends easily, those with difficulties mostly had isolating living situations.”

Meanwhile, the rest of us are stuck in a nightmarish toilet flush of a mental health crisis, a culture mobbed by existential angst.

Except, ironically, for parents of children with Down syndrome. In what might be the most compelling counterargument to the pro-abortion advocates who view termination of a baby indicated to have Down syndrome in prenatal screening, studies adduce that “parents raising a child with Down syndrome experience joy and satisfaction. Nearly 4 in 5 parents of children with Down syndrome report a more positive outlook on life as a result.”

Since its classification as a disorder by physician John Langdon Down in 1862, treatment of people with Down syndrome has evolved.

Liberal values have afforded rights, protections, and freedoms to people with conditions and maladies and handicaps that, until recently, would alienate them or, more likely, result in an unceremonious death.

In 1983, the life expectancy of someone with Down syndrome was 25 years old. Forty years later, that number has risen to 60 years old. Yet the percentage of Americans with Down syndrome is declining, silently, unnaturally.

The end of Down Syndrome?

Abortion rates of Down syndrome pregnancies are higher in Europe than in America. We can’t be certain, though, because the data collection process here in America lacks the categorical neatness found in European countries.

In France, an estimated 77% are aborted. In Denmark, it’s 98%. Iceland somehow outperforms this by aborting 100% of babies who test positive for Down syndrome.

A 2018 fact sheet from the Icelandic government reported that “on average, during the past ten years 2-3 children have been born each year with Down's syndrome in Iceland.”

Every year in America, an estimated average of 5,000 babies are born with Down syndrome.

An estimated “60 percent to 90 percent of children diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted in the U.S., compared to 18 percent of all pregnancies ending in abortion.”

The big business of prenatal screening

The New York Times examined the competitive industry that has emerged for companies that offer prenatal screenings, a rivalry that has led to negligent haste.

Tests screen for trisomy 21, the defect that causes Down syndrome. Down syndrome is not a “fatal fetal anomaly,” and “prenatal tests are not regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).”

Abortion's barbaric roots

Early anthropologists documented abortion in primitive societies. They were surprised to find that the reasons were often unabashedly selfish, ranging from preservation of physique to social status and general autonomy. “The women of Central Celebes will not bear children, and use abortion to avoid it, lest the perineum be torn … a thing which they consider the greatest shame for a woman."

Other tribes applied limits on when motherhood should start, like a Paraguayan tribe that aborted any pregnancy until a woman turned 30.

Wandering tribes could hardly accommodate pregnant women, who often aborted out of fear that they’d be left behind.

Some tribes killed, sacrificed, or abandoned any children who bore abnormalities at birth. This practice has taken place in even the “civilized” nations, at a much greater scale. Several tribes also killed the mothers.

The rate of abortion depended on the needs of the community. Overpopulation, which threatened the food supply and facilitated disease, was one of the most decisive factors. If an overpopulated tribe needed warriors, they kept the boys. If they needed capital, they kept the girls, who could fetch a price for various reasons.

Children could also be sold into slavery.

Anthropologists occasionally reported such heavy use of abortion that it drove a tribe to extinction.

Other tribes viewed abortion with a harshness that would be criminal today: “If an unmarried woman of the Djakun, on the peninsula of Malacca, used abortion, she lost all standing in the tribe. Women despised her; no man would marry her, and she might be degraded by a punishment inflicted by her parents.”

A pro-choice scientist's plea

Bioethicist Chris Kaposy offered a moral argument against abortion of babies with a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome — in the New York Times, no less. He writes that both he and his wife are pro-choice and oppose policy that imposes strict limitations on abortion. Yet his wish is that “more people would include children with Down syndrome in their families. For this to happen,” he adds, “we don’t need new laws; we just need more people to choose to have such children.”

Admittedly, this stance is easy for me to take: I’ve got two kids who don’t have Down syndrome. In all honesty, I would never wish for a child with Down syndrome. All I can offer is a vague promise that if I had a child with Down syndrome, I would cherish him or her — the sacredness of human life.