A recent EWTN News investigation has reignited public attention on one of the most chilling eugenic phenomena in the modern West: the near-total elimination of children with Down syndrome from Icelandic society through prenatal screening and selective abortion. While the article attempts to present a “balanced” picture, the facts it reveals — even in their most sanitized form — constitute an indictment not merely of Icelandic policy, but of the entire culture of death that the post-conciliar world has normalized under the euphemism of “reproductive choice.”
The EWTN News article reports that since prenatal screening was introduced in Iceland in the early 2000s, the termination rate following a positive Down syndrome diagnosis has hovered near 100%. The original 2017 CBS News report quoted Icelandic geneticist Kári Stefánsson boasting: “we have basically eradicated, almost, Down syndrome from our society — that there is hardly ever a child with Down syndrome in Iceland anymore.” Let that statement sink in. A scientist openly celebrates the elimination of an entire class of human beings from a nation, and the world shrugs.
The EWTN article, to its credit, complicates the narrative somewhat. It notes that 15–20% of Icelandic women decline prenatal screening entirely, and that among those who receive high-risk results, roughly 20–25% decline further testing. Dr. Hulda Hjartardóttir, chief of obstetrics at Iceland’s National University Hospital, clarified that the 100% termination figure applies only to those who proceed through the full diagnostic pipeline. A 2020 study found that of 44 confirmed Down syndrome diagnoses between 2012 and 2016, 43 ended in abortion and only one in continued pregnancy — yet 12 children with Down syndrome were still born during that same period, largely due to declined screenings or false negatives.
