Utah has just taken a step toward outlawing abortion because of a Down syndrome diagnosis. House Bill 205, the Down Syndrome Nondiscrimination Abortion Act, passed in the House last week. It will now move to the Utah Senate.
The bill specifies that it would “require[] a physician to provide certain information to a pregnant woman when a prenatal screening or diagnostic test indicates that the pregnant woman’s unborn child has or may have Down syndrome” and would “prohibit[] a person from performing, inducing, or attempting to perform or induce an abortion on a pregnant woman who is seeking the abortion solely because an unborn child has, or may have, Down syndrome.” The bill would also require pathology report information regarding any possible Down syndrome diagnosis and would require affirmation by an abortionist that he or she “did not have knowledge that the pregnant woman sought the abortion solely because the unborn child had or may have had Down syndrome.”
READ: Patricia Heaton blasts Iceland for aborting every single baby with Down syndrome
Further, the bill defines both what abortion is and is not. While abortion advocates may tend to hyperbolize certain pro-life measures by claiming that the measures would ban things that they would not, this bill specifically states that “abortion” does not mean the “removal of a dead unborn child” or the “removal of an ectopic pregnancy.” In other words, this bill would certainly not make those things illegal.
Down syndrome is most often diagnosed midway through pregnancy, sometime around 20 weeks gestation. At this point in pregnancy, a commonly used abortion procedure is the D&E, or dilation and evacuation, in which a living preborn child is brutally dismembered in the womb and is then removed piece by piece. Former abortionist Dr. Anthony Levatino explains in the video below:
Some parents of children with Down syndrome believe that the decision to abort a child with a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome is made out of fear, as was noted by Fox13 Salt Lake City. Parents are sometimes given either inaccurate and outdated information on the condition, or are not given proper resources at all. The pressure from the medical community — as well as society in general — to abort a child with a prenatal diagnosis can be intense, as has been noted multiple times by Live Action News. Around the world, there is pressure to abort children with disabilities, and thankfully, there are also voices speaking out against it.
If House Bill 205 passes in the Utah House, the state could join Ohio, Indiana, and North Dakota as another state which signed legislation into law protecting preborn children with Down syndrome.
