Iceland's "Enlightened" Method for Reducing Down's Syndrome

Rather than get caught up in the storm that erupted after the Charlottesville incident, I want to focus on something equally as malignant, but which receives blessing after blessing from people around the so-called “civilized” world.

Recently, reports have come out of Iceland that it has all but eliminated Downs Syndrome from its shores.  If you aren’t careful to read past headlines, you might assume Icelandic doctors, researchers, and scientists have come up with a miraculous way to insure babies don’t develop the extra chromosome which causes Downs. 

Not so fast.

Iceland is seeing less and less of children with Downs because its citizens are deciding to abort babies who test positive for Downs while in the womb.  This should outrage and disgust anyone with a conscience for at least three reasons.  First, no testing is always correct, which means some of these children wouldn’t have Downs Syndrome and are still being aborted because prospective parents would rather kill off an “acceptable” child than take the chance of an “unacceptable” child.  What kind of human being feels that way about their flesh and blood?  Second, and more disturbing, it’s a short leap from aborting Downs Syndrome children to aborting children for things like red hair.  In other words, there is a scary, Hitlerian, master race overtone here.  Third, and most disturbing, there is an arrogance here that human beings have some kind of control of the world.

When are we going to recognize that our “control” is an illusion?  The world operates all around us whether we wake up in the morning , whether we get in our cars and go to work, whether we sing, pray, read, watch television, blog, play sports, exercise, take medicine or do anything.  The writer of Ecclesiastes understood this principle very well when writing “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.”  Ecclesiastes 3:1.  More:  “Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to men of skill but time and chance happen to them all.”   Ecclesiastes 9:11. 

Icelanders may think they’re doing humanity some sort of service by eliminating Downs Syndrome babies but what they’re really doing is trying to control the uncontrollable.  God retains rights over his planet.  He will do as he will and no one in Iceland can stop it.   If God wants more Downs Syndrome babies, he’ll find other people to have them and love them.

The irony is of course that when people engage in this sort of behavior it’s always done in the name of decency and kindness.  Hmm.  Decency and kindness to whom?  The child who was just killed?  I read an article about this in which one Icelandic woman referred to these precious souls as “things.”  Her word, not mine.  Really?  What then does that make this woman other than a larger, born, thing?  Is that how she perceives herself and others?  I doubt it.  Do people in Iceland tell their kids “hey, you know I would have disposed of you if you had Downs Syndrome, but you got lucky and hit the chromosome jackpot.  There’s nothing special about you except that you fit the bill I was looking for.  You just happened to be a non-Downs Syndrome thing."  You know they don’t say that.

More importantly, are children mere commodities?  Is that really where we are?  In the US we have Planned Non-Parenthood selling off baby parts and decrying any effort to end abortion.  They claim what they are doing is a moral good.  In any other context, the killing of human beings would be seen as the apex of moral evil.  If I said, hey Hitler was okay to gas millions of Jews, because, after all, people are just commodities, just “things,” I would rightly be met with disgust.  For crying out loud, you can’t even get some animal rights activists to recognize the need for culling herds of deer that live within predator free metropolitan areas  - these deer are going to die from starvation or disease or being hit by cars, but let’s not kill any of them because SAY IT WITH ME NOW – YOU KNOW THE WORDS – it’s cruel.  If we care  more about deer than human babies, we know there’s a serious problem.

But killing babies who might have Downs Syndrome – that’s called eradicating Downs Syndrome in Iceland.  It sounds sensible, moral, justifiable.  In the most bizarre fashion, it’s not seen as cruel at all.  It’s enlightened.

Let’s change the scenario and think about how people would react to abortion for a different reason.  Suppose scientists finally find the elusive “gay” gene.  Suppose parents start aborting children because they don’t want gay children.  We all know precisely how that would be treated by the “enlightened.”   Of course, never mind that logically and rationally there is no difference between a parent aborting a Downs Syndrome child and a gay child.  In fact, as we launch ourselves down this path, upon what grounds could anyone argue that aborting a “thing” has any moral significance?  Either this “thing” is a human being deserving of protection or it’s not.  If it’s not, then there is no moral distinction between “things” just like there’s no moral distinction between a cardboard box and cement block.

This lets me circle right back to Hitler.  When we start treating the most vulnerable among us – children in the womb – as commodities, are we not treating them precisely as Hitler treated the Jews?  Does that not then, make us equally culpable?

Icelanders may be eradicating Downs Syndrome, but make no mistake, they’re simply doing what Hitler did.  The only difference is the age of the victims.