A politician from the United Kingdom who supports abortion has expressed that he is uncomfortable with the country’s law that allows abortion for preborn children with Down syndrome — all the way to birth.
In an exclusive interview with Evangelical Times, Elliot Colburn said it does not “sit right with him” that parents are expected to kill their preborn children after a Down syndrome diagnosis, expressing his horror when he had parents tell him they were “thrust a leaflet on abortion without any discussion or offer of support when their baby had been found to have Down syndrome.”
“It does not sit right with me that termination is not only offered, but almost expected, in many cases, as per the stories some mums shared with me,” he said. Per The Christian Institute, around 90 percent of all children in the UK who receive this diagnosis in the womb are aborted; the latest figures show that 760 with Down syndrome were aborted in 2022.
‘This is something I’ve spoken about before with Get On Downs, a local Down Syndrome Charity, and as someone who co-sponsored the Down Syndrome Act, I take this matter very seriously,” he said.
Passed in 2022, the Down Syndrome Act strives to improve the lives of people living with Down syndrome and bring more awareness to the condition. According to a government website, “It aims to ensure that health, social care, education and other local authority services such as housing take account of the specific needs of people with Down’s syndrome when commissioning or providing services.”
While legislation like this is a huge benefit to people living with Down syndrome, as Colburn realized, it has little impact if the people it’s meant to benefit have already been killed based on their diagnosis. Despite a number of attempts by activists to change the discriminatory and eugenic law, it remains legal to kill preborn babies with Down syndrome all the way up to birth.
As the organization Don’t Screen Us Out noted, “It is deeply concerning that despite the leaps that advocacy groups have made in raising awareness in support of people with Down’s syndrome, abortion in the case of Down’s syndrome is still so commonplace and widespread in the UK.”
