Down syndrome might disappear from the streets in the West

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The figures are alarming: Denmark could soon be a country without people with Down syndrome. Almost all affected unborn children are aborted.

Two weeks ago, I met a girl and her mother on the underground. The girl sat down opposite me, tapped the empty seat next to her and loudly shouted: “Mummy, you sit here” across the carriage. Then she interrogated her mother about when they would finally go out for pizza: on Monday or Tuesday?

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Slowly, some of the passengers turned to look at her – many were surprised, some were curious, and some were annoyed. The girl then snuggled even closer to her mother, who whispered to her to speak a little more quietly. She was probably about nine years old. She had Down’s syndrome.

With her uninhibited and innocent nature, she brought a breath of fresh air to the underground, where people mostly devote themselves to their mobile phones in silence. Generally speaking, it had been a long time since I had met someone as happy and genuine as this girl.

People with Trisomy 21 are being born less and less often in Germany. This is because, sadly, 90 to 95 per cent of mothers of children with Down syndrome abort them before they are born, according to estimates by the German Down Syndrome Information Centre. This is despite the fact that every human being is created in the image of God and has a value that ‘does not depend on what he has or on his abilities’, as Pope Francis put it a few years ago at a meeting with children with disabilities.

More than half of European children with Down syndrome die in the womb.

There are no precise details or statistics on how many people with Down syndrome live in Germany. Figures have only been collected in Saxony-Anhalt and Mainz, and the following extrapolations have been made for the whole of Germany: on average, there is one child with Down syndrome for every 800 births. With almost 700,000 births a year, this results in approximately 875 babies with trisomy 21. Overall, 30,000 to 50,000 citizens living in Germany are affected by the disease.

By way of comparison, in Europe, with around 3.7 million births per year, an average of 8,031 children are born with trisomy 21. Without the painfully high abortion rate –54 per cent of all children with trisomy die in the womb– 17,331 of them would be born each year.

Unwanted

Denmark could soon be ‘without people with trisomy,’ various media outlets report. It sounds frightening as if these people were unwanted. Who are we to decide on the life and death of our neighbour? In 2019, only 18 children with Down syndrome were born in the northern European country, and in 2017 there were even fewer.

Since 2004, the country has offered pregnant women the option of prenatal Down syndrome screening. It has been a pioneer in this area worldwide. 97 per cent of mothers took the test. Some would only announce their offspring to family and friends when the child showed no abnormalities.

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The German magazine Der Spiegel, from which this information originates, puts it alarmingly differently: “97 per cent of pregnant women in the country can make a free decision about whether or not they want a disabled child.” If the test shows that the child is highly likely to have Down syndrome, 95 per cent of parents would kill it before it was born.

Yet, as Der Spiegel goes on to report, state funding and medical care for people with this condition in Denmark are better than ever.

This article was translated by CNE.news and published by Die Tagespost on February 9, 2025

Read more about Down Syndrome

Down Syndrome is a disability caused by a deviation in the DNA.