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The values of post-Christian ethics continue to be revealed.
Even in Australia parents whose unborn child is identified as downs syndrome will be encouraged to abort.
The last paragraph of this article brings the argument home.

From the Stand To Reason blog:

Whether a Western nation is cleansing itself of a race, an ethnicity, or a disability, the reasoning justifying it is the same: human beings have instrumental, not intrinsic, value. That is, we’re not valuable merely because we’re human beings; rather, each individual earns his or her value by meeting certain requirements set by society—age, sex, ability, intelligence, race, etc.

In this understanding, only a subset of the human race is valuable, as certain other members of the species are defined out of the group by the people in power. Then the title of “human being” or “person” is simply denied to those other members, making it psychologically easier for the valuable subset to end the lives of those who didn’t make the cut, for the “good of society.”

So there are two closely-related ideas that must be in place for atrocities of this kind to happen: 1) Human value depends on the presence of certain characteristics or abilities, and 2) The real value of a human being is not objective, but is set by the preferences of other human beings (e.g., pregnant mothers are granted the right to declare whether or not the lives of their unborn children are worthy of the protection of the law).

And these same ideas that support abortion are behind this:

Here’s a recent Danish headline: “Plans to make Denmark a Down syndrome-free perfect society.” The Danes want to promote aborting fetuses with Down syndrome, so their society will be free of such people around 2030.

I was able to find an awkward translation of what seems to be the original article:

Denmark has decided not listen to people who may complain of human selection and have put their foot on the ground to promote increase abortion of foetuses suspected of having Down syndrome. As such is if progress continues at this rate, the last case to be born with the illness will be around the year 2030, according Danish news paper Berlingske.

Since 2004, when Denmark decided to start controlling the number of children born with Down syndrome, the cases have fallen by around 13 percent annually….

Niels Uldbjerg is at the gynaecological-obstetrical at the at Aarhus University and researcher in medical ethics. As a professional he describes it as “fantastic achievement” that the number of newborns with Down syndrome is approaching zero.

At Stand to Reason, we’ve been saying there’s “only one question” that has to be answered when evaluating abortion: “What is it?” But that’s not really the case anymore. There’s actually another, deeper question: “What is a human being?” If we’re merely the evolutionary result of blind, purposeless, unknowing, and uncaring natural processes, with only instrumental value conferred on us by the subjective preferences of the majority of other human beings, then asking if a creature is of the human species won’t answer the question of whether or not we can kill it.

The reasoning is now in place in the West to begin to more aggressively separate the valuable humans from the non-valuable ones. If you’re okay with this development, you should keep in mind that the line has a funny way of not staying in a place you’re comfortable with.

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