The headlines read like this: “Iceland is Becoming Nearly the First Country with no Down Syndrome Births”. Wonderful, one might think. What medical breakthrough has Iceland discovered? Read the story and you find out that it has nothing to do with a medical breakthrough. Just genetic testing of embryos followed by, in the case of diagnosing Down Syndrome, a near universal application of abortion.
Here is the original story from CBS News. It is actually more nuanced than one might think, raising the question, “What kind of world do we want to live in?” A world without Down Syndrome? Or a world that aborts those who have it?
Alexandra Desanctis discusses the story from a pro-life perspective in Down Syndrome in Iceland: CBS News’s Disturbing Report | National Review.
Reacting to the story and the backlash it has provoked, sources in Iceland are challenging the CBS piece. Read this from Iceland Magazine. Actually, according to that article, women carrying a Down Syndrome baby are not pressured to get an abortion, and the subsequent abortion rate is not close to 100%. Rather, 15-20% of women choose to keep the baby, and when they do, they are given support and help in caring for their Down child. (Though the article goes on to explain condescendingly that “Icelanders have a different view of abortions than many on the political right in the US,” namely, that it is OK and a woman’s decision.)
But, in fairness, the once-Lutheran Iceland is an exceedingly tiny country, with a population of only 332,529, about the size of St. Louis. Which makes it ripe for statistical distortions.
But treating Down Syndrome by abortion is rampant. In the United Kingdom, according to DeSanctis, 90% of women who receive that diagnosis abort their child. In Europe as a whole, 92% of such babies are “terminated.” In the United States, the number is between 67% and 90%. Compare those numbers to Iceland’s 85-80%, which is actually less than the rate in these other countries.
But one of the many things I found disturbing in the CBS story is the way counselors in Iceland–apparently with the complicity of the church–normalize and even sanctify the abortion by means of religious imagery:
Over at Landspitali University Hospital, Helga Sol Olafsdottir counsels women who have a pregnancy with a chromosomal abnormality. They speak to her when deciding whether to continue or end their pregnancies. Olafsdottir tells women who are wrestling with the decision or feelings of guilt: “This is your life — you have the right to choose how your life will look like.”
She showed Quijano [the CBS reporter] a prayer card inscribed with the date and tiny footprints of a fetus that was terminated.
Quijano noted, “In America, I think some people would be confused about people calling this ‘our child,’ saying a prayer or saying goodbye or having a priest come in — because to them abortion is murder.”
A priest comes in to say a prayer? Saying goodbye? A memento of the abortion with the dead child’s footprints? To do such things implies a recognition of the child’s humanity, and yet still the child is killed, though the church makes the parents feel better.
Photo by Himileanmedia (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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