Nottingham University Hospitals in the UK is under investigation. Why? Because the government-run hospital urged several UK couples to abort after prenatal genetic testing supposedly showed that their babies would be born with birth defects.
The couples followed the hospital’s advice, only to discover to their horror that they had aborted perfectly healthy babies. It turned out that, undisclosed by the hospital, the tests are not 100 percent accurate.
The BBC blamed the hospital for what it called a tragedy, but that’s not the whole story. It is undeniably tragic that healthy babies were sentenced to death because they were thought to have a low quality of life. But even if the children, for example, actually had Down’s Syndrome, their deaths would have been equally tragic.
It’s not just the hospital that failed these couples; it’s the wider culture that demands perfect children while relying on imperfect tests. And it’s a society that, despite the horrors of Nazi eugenics, continues to quietly cultivate the idea of breeding a better man.
As technology has advanced, people assume that our scientific techniques are unfailing and that we can play God, deciding who lives and who dies on the basis of genetic testing. This is clearly, utterly wrong.
Prenatal genetic testing is far from perfect. As with most diagnostic tests, there are failures and inaccuracies which are seldom discussed with patients. For example, the most common way of screening for genetic abnormalities during pregnancy is through a test of the mother’s blood, known as “noninvasive prenatal testing” (NIPT). Doctors often boast of NIPT’s success rate, claiming that the test has a 99% chance of detecting Down syndrome or trisomy 18. It is slightly less accurate, at 90%, for trisomy 13 and sex chromosome disorders.[1]
People feel reassured because NIPT’s false-positive rate for these conditions is low. For example, the false positive rate for detecting trisomy 21 and trisomy 18 is approximately 1 in 500 or 0.2%.[2] But, remember, NIPT has become a common procedure during pregnancy. Globally, an average of 10 million NIPT tests are performed each year.[3] That’s 20,000 misdiagnosed babies per year on average. How many are aborted?
Live Action, a U.S.-based pro-life non-profit, has previously reported that up to 6% of expecting parents choose to abort after an unexpected diagnosis, without a follow-up test to confirm. That’s 1,200 healthy babies aborted every year.
But we at PRI don’t just mourn the loss of the “perfect” babies. We mourn the loss of every unborn child whose life was snuffed out prematurely.
The reliance on genetic testing is not the only problem. The second, even larger issue, is that the conditioned response to a genetic issue in an unborn child is abortion. Eugenics lives on, in the way that society has convinced the public to carry out population control voluntarily. Couples are conditioned to prune the imperfect members of society by aborting their “imperfect” children of their own volition.
Many doctors seem to push a “wipe the slate clean” attitude. They act as if killing the child you are currently pregnant with to start over with a new pregnancy is completely normal. Abortion in these cases, when the baby may have a lower quality of life or is deemed incompatible with life outside the womb, is presented as the “compassionate choice.”
Many doctors, and much of the general public, pretend that abortion offers an alternative to suffering in these cases, for the unborn child and the parents. In reality, it is still suffering but of a different variety. The truth is that if a child is incompatible with life, and if that diagnosis is correct and unavoidable, the parents will face the pain of losing their child. Killing that child before he or she dies doesn’t fix that pain. If anything it compounds it, as the parents, along with the abortionist, become the ones responsible for the child’s death.
As I’ve pointed out before, tests like NIPT are not inherently wrong. Some expecting parents simply want to prepare for their birth experience or the potential needs of their child. However, some use the tests to determine whether or not they should kill their unborn child, which is unquestionably wrong.
Population control, in this rebranded form, continues to be pervasive around the world. Couples don’t need to be coerced to kill their child, if the child is “undesirable” to them in some way. The first problem to fix is our reliance on genetic testing. The second, and arguably even more important, is that we need to expose and counter the eugenic mindset that abortion is the answer to imperfection in our unborn children. We need to build a culture of life that supports expecting couples and motivates them to carry pregnancies to term, even if the child faces a difficult disability or a too-short lifespan.
******
An earlier version of this article originally published on February 27, 2025, under the title, “Our Culture & The Eugenic Mindset.”
[1] https://www.ohsu.edu/womens-health/prenatal-screening-and-genetics
[3] https://obgyn.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pd.6296
