Pope Francis: Abuse revelations are purifying the Church

CNA Staff, Jan 5, 2021 / 03:31 pm (CNA).- The number of babies with Down syndrome who were born in Europe fell by half between 2011 and 2015— confirming the fears of pro-life campaigners in the UK, who have long argued that increased prenatal testing for Down syndrome has led many women to abort their children.

A study published during December 2020 in the European Journal of Human Genetics examined the years 2011-2015 to determine the number of babies born with Down syndrome across all countries in Europe, and compared those numbers to estimates of how many babies would have been born with Down syndrome had they not been aborted.

The study found that 54% fewer babies with Down syndrome were born during that period in the United Kingdom than estimates would have expected— a figure roughly in line with the European average.

Notably, in the UK, non-invasive prenatal testing for Down syndrome has been available since 2012 to any woman willing to pay the £500 bill, the BBC reports.

In Spain and Italy, the percentage of reduction was 83% and 71%, respectively.

Abortion is legal in the United Kingdom until the 24th week of pregnancy, except when continuing the pregnancy is dangerous to the physical or mental health of the mother, as well as in cases where the baby will “suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped.”

For these disabilities, which can include Down syndrome, cleft lip, and club foot, abortion is legal up to birth. Most of the country’s 200,000 or so annual abortions take place before 13 weeks.

Right to Life UK, a pro-life group active in the country, has documented several instances of women being pressured to abort their children as a result of the prenatal test, with one mother reporting that she had been “offered about 15 terminations,” including when she was 38 weeks pregnant. By some estimates, nine out of ten women in the UK who receive a diagnosis of Down syndrome abort their child.

Increased use of NIPT have prompted several medical professional organizations in the UK, including The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, to issue guidelines urging doctors not apply pressure for abortion based on the results of the tests.

An investigation last summer found that the number of births of Down syndrome babies has fallen by 30% in National Health Service hospitals that offer NIPT.

The “Don’t Screen Us Out” campaign in the United Kingdom has, for the past four years, been drawing awareness to and seeking to change the UK’s abortion laws, seeking to amend the Abortion Act 1967 so that abortions for non-fatal disabilities are outlawed in the third trimester, which starts around 28 weeks of pregnancy.

Lynn Murray, a spokesperson for the group, told CNA in an interview last year that the campaign began in response to the government’s proposal of a relatively new screening method for Down syndrome— known as “cell-free DNA” tests— that, according to the government, would find an additional 102 cases of Down syndrome a year.

Given the high rate of termination for babies in the UK found to have Down syndrome, the campaign formed in order to try to get the government to assess the impact that the non-invasive prenatal testing technique— which is already being offered at NHS hospitals— would have on the Down syndrome community. The campaign attracted attention among Britons with similar concerns, she said.

Early last year, a 25-year-old British woman with Down syndrome, Heidi Crowter, launched a lawsuit against the UK government seeking to change the laws.

Crowter is joined in the lawsuit by Cheryl Bilsborrow, the mother of a two-year-old with Down syndrome, who has said that she was strongly encouraged to have an abortion after doctors performed the screening test on her unborn child. Máire Lea-Wilson, mother of nearly two-year-old son Aiden, who has Down syndrome, also has joined the lawsuit.

In October, the High Court of England and Wales agreed to hear the legal challenge.

The UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has consistently criticized countries which provide for abortion on the basis of disability. In some countries, such as Iceland, the abortion rate for babies believed to have Down syndrome is close to 100%.

Servant of God Jerome Lejeune discovered the genetic cause for Down syndrome— an extra copy of chromosome 21— in 1958. He spent the rest of his life researching treatments and cures for the condition, advocating against the use of prenatal testing and the abortion of unborn children who were found to have Down syndrome.

Berthe Lejeune, Dr. Lejeune’s widow, has said her husband was heartbroken that many doctors and governments have since used his discovery to “screen out” babies with Down syndrome, targeting them for abortion.

“He thought that all doctors would be happy to find research to cure them,” Lejeune told EWTN Pro-Life Weekly in 2017.

“But sadly, all government[s], not only in France, said: oh, it’s a wonderful discovery. You can detect these little sick children before they are born, and so take them away with an abortion.”

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London, England, May 18, 2018 / 01:13 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- After debate this week, the Guernsey legislature has moved to reject a proposed legalization of physician assisted suicide on the island, drawing praise from the local bishop.

“Delighted… […]

Fatima, Portugal, May 15, 2017 / 11:11 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Jose Antonio dos Santos, an immigrant from Venezuela now living in Barcelona, made his way to Fatima for the centenary of the Marian apparitions with a special request for Our Lady: a solution for the dire crisis unfolding in his homeland.

Dos Santos, who held a large Venezuelan flag, told journalists May 13 that he came to Fatima to raise “the cry of a people and to ask the Virgin of Fatima the same thing that has come from her message 100 years ago, which was peace in Portugal and the freedom of a country that was oppressed.”

When Mary appeared to three young shepherd children in 1917, she came in the midst of a world embroiled in war – both on a global scale during World War I, and on a more local scale in Portugal itself, which was in a period of instability after the revolution and coup d’état leading to the establishment of the First Portuguese Republic in 1910.

Roughly 220,000 Portuguese civilians died during the war, thousands due to food shortages, and thousands more from the Spanish flu.

“Now the same thing is happening in Venezuela,” Dos Santos said, explaining that as he participates in the centenary celebrations of the Fatima Marian apparitions, he brings with him the petition for “a solution, above all for a country that is without medicine, without food.”

“It’s completely neglected in the entire country,” he said, adding that he hoped his flag would be a visible appeal to Pope Francis, who “who knows what it is to work on the peripheries.”

Dos Santos is originally from Madeira, Venezuela, but has been living in Barcelona for 10 years. He was forced to immigrate to Spain along with his ailing mother and two sisters when the family could no longer access medicine for his mother’s illness.

Riots have spiked in Venezuela in recent years, resulting from unemployment, food and medicine shortages, and President Nicolás Maduro’s authoritarian policies.

Price controls in 2003 caused inflation rates to skyrocket on basic necessities, barring the access of food and medicines to the people. Poor socialist policies have affected many products, and while they remain affordable on the shelf, they are under-produced and are soon swept off and sold on the black market at a triple digit inflation rate.

Violent riots have fluctuated since the death of the previous president Hugo Chavez in 2013, but gained even more traction after opposition leaders were arrested last year and Maduro’s attempt for more power by dissolving the legislature in March of this year.

Now working as a crewman for an airline company, Dos Santos said the situation in Venezuela has become “impossible.”

The conditions that Venezuelans are living in today is inconceivable, he said, adding that “what the world knows about what is happening there is practically nothing” due to strict control of the media.

Javier Pereira, one of Dos Santos’ three companions, said he appreciates the concern Pope Francis has shown for Venezuela, but voiced doubt that the nation’s government is listening.

“The Pope always asks through prayer and dialogue, but unfortunately the government of Venezuela pretends to agree with what the Pope says, but what is really happening in Venezuela (is) completely different,” Pereira said, explaining that the government is able to keep up the façade because they control the media.

“People don’t know because the media is closed, and they don’t publish. What is published is that yes, they want dialogue to be done, but what is happening, is not (dialogue),” he said.

Giving an example, Dos Santos said that Cardinal Jorge Liberato Urosa Savino of Caracas was once beaten inside the basilica of Santa Teresa for suggesting that opposition and government forces come to an understanding.

The cardinal had been celebrating Mass for the feast of the Nazareno de San Pablo, one of the biggest devotions in Venezuela, and simply said he hoped “there would be an understanding between people of the opposition and the government,” Dos Santos said.

After Mass, a group of people came to into the sacristy and “they hit him inside the basilica and he had to be escorted out.”

Media don’t report on this type of incident, Dos Santos said, and so the only way people find out about it is through social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, “because the people are the ones using social communication.”

What he wants to ask Our Lady of Fatima, then, is “for freedom and the peace of Venezuela,” and that she would inspire “the governments of the countries that do not intervene” to help.

He said that should he get the opportunity, he would ask Pope Francis “to intercede as an authority, as an important figure, and to mediate, at least for now, a channel for medicine and food.”

“This is why we wanted to come early and be first in line, so that form the altar he can understand the message,” he said, pointing to his flag, which isn’t merely a banner for Venezuela, but “it’s a message from an entire country that cries out for freedom.”

Pope Francis recently sent a message to the country’s bishops, urging them to continue promoting a culture of encounter.

“Dear brothers, I wish to encourage you to not allow the beloved children of Venezuela to allow themselves to be overcome by distrust or despair since these are evils that sink into the hearts of people when they do not see future prospects,” he said in a May 5 letter.

“I am persuaded that Venezuela’s serious problems can be solved if there is the desire to establish bridges, to dialogue seriously and to comply with the agreements that were reached.”

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