Scotland has recorded an 82% jump in the number of Down syndrome abortions since 2021.
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.
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By Jonathon van Maren
Jonathon is the author of The Culture War, Seeing is Believing: Why Our Culture Must Face the Victims of Abortion, Patriots: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Pro-Life Movement, Prairie Lion: The Life and Times of Ted Byfield, and co-author of A Guide to Discussing Assisted Suicide with Blaise Alleyne. He serves as the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.