Iceland poised to completely wipe out Down Syndrome through abortion

Iceland is apparently on the brink of completely eradicating Down Syndrome because women in the country are aborting nearly all the unborn babies with the condition.

According to a report by CBS, since the introduction of prenatal screening tests in the early 2000s, nearly 100 percent of pregnant women in Iceland who received a positive test for Down syndrome opted for an abortion.

While the government does not require pregnant women to take the prenatal screening tests that detect Down syndrome, the Landspitali University Hospital in the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik says that about 80 to 85 percent of expectant mothers opted to be screened voluntarily.

Helga Sol Olafsdottir, a Landspitali University Hospital counselor, helps pregnant women make a decision when their unborn child has been diagnosed with the condition.

"This is your life — you have the right to choose how your life will look like," she tells her patients.

"We don't look at abortion as a murder. We look at it as a thing that we ended. We ended a possible life that may have had a huge complication ... preventing suffering for the child and for the family," she added.

Geneticist Kari Stefansson, the founder of deCODE Genetics, is critical of Iceland's approach to children with the disorder. His company has studied nearly the entire Icelandic population's genomes.

"My understanding is that we have basically eradicated, almost, Down syndrome from our society -- that there is hardly ever a child with Down syndrome in Iceland anymore," he said.

When asked what the 100 percent termination rate means for Icelandic society, Steffanson said: "It reflects a relatively heavy-handed genetic counseling and I don't think that heavy-handed genetic counseling is desirable. ... You're having impact on decisions that are not medical, in a way," he continued.

CBS noted that just one or two children are born with Down syndrome on average each year, sometimes after their parents received inaccurate test results.

Other countries are not too far behind in the termination rate of unborn babies found with the disorder. In the U.S., the estimated rate for Down syndrome between 1995 and 2011 was 67 percent.

In 2015, the rate in France was 77 percent and 90 percent in the U.K. In Denmark, the government reported in 2014 that 98 percent of unborn babies who tested positive for Down Syndrome were aborted.

Late-term abortions are legal in many of these countries in cases of fetal anomalies, such as Down Syndrome. In the U.K., abortions are illegal after 24 weeks, but there are wide exceptions for late-term abortions in cases involving fetal anomalies.