Our Culture & The Eugenic Mindset

Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust is under investigation. Several UK couples shared their experience of receiving incorrect prenatal genetic testing results, which led them to abort their perfectly healthy babies.

The big focus in this story, as told by BBC, is that the hospital failed these parents, but that’s only the partial truth. It is undeniably tragic that perfectly healthy babies were given the death penalty for the possibility that they might not be perfectly healthy. But it’s not just the hospital that failed these couples, it’s a culture that expects perfect children while relying on imperfect tests and a society that, underneath it all, has retained a eugenic mindset.

As technology has advanced, many people seem to assume that we can now play God and our scientific techniques are unfailing. This is clearly, utterly wrong.

Prenatal genetic testing is not a perfect system. As with most diagnostic tests, there are failures and inaccuracies, which are often dismissed. 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, because the test has a 99% chance of detecting Down syndrome or trisomy 18. It is slightly less accurate, 90%, for trisomy 13 and sex chromosome disorders.

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%. But, remember, NIPT has become a common procedure during pregnancy. Globally, an average of 10 million NIPT tests are performed each year. That’s 20,000 misdiagnosed babies per year on average.

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 don’t just mourn the healthy babies, the “perfect” ones. We mourn 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 problem in an unborn child is abortion. Eugenics lives on, convincing 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 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 marketed as “compassionate.”

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 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.