This October - which, coincidentally, is Down Syndrome Month - it emerged that patients with Down's are being deprived of nutrition in British hospitals; they are being starved to death.
Back in June, an amendment decriminalising abortion up to birth was added to the Crime and Policing Bill as it progressed through Parliament; MPs voted 379 to 137 in favour.
Could there be a connection? The vote sent shock waves through the media, but abortion up to birth is already legal in some cases. The 1967 Abortion Act decriminalised it on certain grounds, including for 'serious handicap' - cleft palate and club foot counted - but mandated the same limit in all cases: 28 weeks.
This was governed by viability, although when it was reduced to 24 weeks in 1990, disabled babies were not covered; consequently, they could be aborted up to birth. Despite campaigns to highlight this glaring case of discrimination, attempts to rectify it have failed.
The early abortion campaign warned that infanticide would result if abortion remained illegal, and campaigners continue to warn of even worse things if their demands are not met. However, it seems strange to demand abortion up to birth when babies now survive at 21-22 weeks - elsewhere at least, since UK guidelines recommend medical care only for babies born at or after 22 weeks.
In future, they may survive even earlier, and recently, more than 700 medical professionals asked MPs to support another amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill to lower the limit to 22 weeks, 'in line with advances in medical science.' Their open letter stated: "[I]n the decade to 2019 alone, the survival rate for babies born at 23 weeks doubled, prompting new guidance from the British Association of Perinatal Medicine", enabling "doctors to intervene to save premature babies from 22 weeks gestation."
Regardless, Labour's November 2019 manifesto promised complete decriminalisation, meaning abortion up to birth, for any reason.
"At-home abortions" have never been easier to access, with numbers increasing in a system made permanent by the Conservatives in 2022; abortion pills may be taken up to 9 weeks and 6 days in England and Wales, and in Scotland, up to 12 weeks; Northern Ireland still bans 'DIY' abortion.
However, "home abortions" are far from cosy affairs, and disposing of the resulting "waste material" poses serious environmental problems - largely ignored by environmentalists, although it did attract notice when such "material" was used to heat British hospitals.
Furthermore, since "pills-by-post" was introduced, there have been high-profile prosecutions for self-abortion. Reports of 'newborn babies' being abandoned may suggest that some women are taking the pills much later than permitted.
Despite this, campaigners are using such cases to push for complete decriminalisation - for abortion to become "a healthcare matter, rather than a legal one."
Indeed, major abortion provider BPAS used a tragic case occurring at around 32 weeks' pregnancy - with pills provided by them - to call for abortion up to birth.
Former BPAS chief executive Ann Furedi said clinics made "every effort... to reduce the burden on the woman", but late abortion "is still an awful, grim experience." Despite this, in "The new abortion law is nothing to fear: Late-term abortions are never entered into lightly", she describes some media reaction to decriminalisation as "nothing short of hysterical. One expects anti-abortion groups to get in a tizzy and wildly exaggerate the effects of a change like this", but "the discourse among even many feminists" suggested they had "lost touch with reason".
She said BPAS was "proud of a service that provided abortions to the latest day that we could", and when "the government, by sleight of hand, reduced the definition of the 24-week time limit by one day, we challenged the Secretary of State in the High Court."
She said that although early abortions were 'often seen as an extension of birth control', the 'right to choose' means late abortions carry 'the moral weight and responsibility of making that choice' - and as 'the woman is the one who has to live with her choices, I prefer to trust her to make her own choice, rather than listen to the opinions of those who know nothing about her.'
BPAS, she maintained, saw early abortion as 'less contentious than later procedures' - that 'its ubiquity' made 'it easy to defend, and that unwanted pregnancy is feared and abortion as a solution is reassuring (even if you don't need it)' - but the organisation 'backed away from a defence of later abortions because they are the least understood and most harrowing procedures.'
Now, "a seemingly uncontroversial bill, which considers the pointlessness of punishing women who are unlikely repeat offenders or exemplars, spirals into a debate about the fundamental principles of abortion law." She insisted the legal "change" was "relatively small and doesn't constitute 'decriminalisation'", claiming that in Scotland, pre-1990, "[w]omen didn't want to have late-term abortions, and doctors didn't want to perform them."
Using circular (and self-serving) reasoning, abortion advocates justify late terminations based on their "harrowing" nature, although clearly this is because it means giving birth to a dead baby, intentionally killed. But by filing it under "individual choice", they can evade their own responsibility for the killing.
The lengthy process makes it an unattractive proposition for the abortion industry, but if hardly any women want late abortions, why legalise it - especially now that early abortion, supposed to render later ones unnecessary, is so easy to access? Perhaps they envisage women having late abortions in their own homes.
Abortion up to birth is even more controversial, and since testing for Down's is now possible at 10 weeks, coinciding with the limit for abortion pill use, it places a question mark over the "need" for late terminations; however, some women resist being tested, clearly frustrating those medics who support unlimited "choice". No wonder women are "guided" (a.k.a. bullied) by medical advice to see abortion as the better option.
However, with amniocentesis typically done between 15 and 20 weeks, the aborted child may feel pain, and it is a strange sort of "healthcare" that inflicts pain on the patient and requires their body parts to be reassembled to ensure that nothing has escaped the lethal "treatment".
Still, the campaign for late abortion continues, despite - or perhaps because of - a 2022 campaign to equalise the time limit for all babies. Led by Heidi Crowter, a young woman with Down syndrome, the legal challenge failed, but she determined to take her case to the ECHR.
She succeeded in raising awareness of this blatant discrimination, but if time limits are raised for all babies, we will see a rather twisted view of equality, although one that disguises the main target: disability.
Campaigners insist that the amendment only applies to women, but few would want to perform a late-term abortion on themselves; and - despite government insistence that providers have safeguards against coercion - the many cases of coerced abortion suggest that the coercers are not too bothered about the law. And if they can force a woman to abort, they can also force her to claim that she was acting alone. Abusers will be handed a 'get out of jail free' card - without even having to go to jail.
Regardless, campaigners warn about abortion being "banned" in the United States to justify abortion without limits in the UK. Meanwhile, our governing elites have designated it a "minor issue", although it seems the public differs, with 62% agreeing that abortion should not be decriminalised, only 1% wanting abortion up to birth, and 70% of women wanting a limit of 20 weeks or less.
Despite this, decriminalisation may well succeed, thanks to warnings about "even more extreme" US-style bans.
But decriminalisation would favour a truly extreme approach: eugenics. Back in the 1930s, eugenicists wanted disabled people killed, but their campaign was halted by the Nazi euthanasia programme. However, in the 1960s, the tiny abortion campaign suddenly expanded, in the context of serious infant disabilities caused by Thalidomide.
As one commentator notes: "Eugenics isn't always about forced sterilisations or gas chambers", but "about deciding which lives are worth living and which are not - and enshrining that judgment in state policy."
Our state policy appears to be to manage public opinion on this issue, and if the public dares to differ, we are massaged by a mass media that treats women prosecuted for late abortions as being persecuted.
Even late abortion can be portrayed as more compassionate than neglecting a disabled newborn to death - as they did in ancient times, abandoning such babies in the wilderness.
Today, however, abortion up to birth would make euthanasia by omission an added risk for disabled babies, and prominent atheist philosopher Peter Singer thought pre-birth killing led to infanticide and euthanasia; although supporting all three, he stated frankly:
"Abortion foreshadowed what was about to become accepted practice in other areas, including the withdrawal of treatment from patients in a hopeless condition, and the selective nontreatment of disabled infants."
But while "opponents of abortion have made this point repeatedly, those who support abortion prefer... to see the issue as one of freedom of choice."
Doubtless, infanticide, if not claimed as "choice", will be presented as kinder for children than being disabled - the same rationale as for disability abortions.
Our problem-solving nation has produced many positive things; sadly, it has also given the world Utilitarianism, under which everything is judged by its usefulness. Under this subjective concept, abortion is a useful way of preventing "useless lives".
If this sounds extreme, it may sound less so when "extreme" "anti-choice" campaigners are monitored by the security services. Even the silencing of silent prayer near abortion facilities is portrayed as necessary to combat "extreme" pro-lifers - although President Trump highlighted the extremism of abortion advocates when he criticised attacks on free speech in the UK, where offering help to needy pregnant women is being criminalised as abortion is being decriminalised.
But when faced with "horrible histories" of grim orphanages and cruel nuns, abortion might seem the kinder option for "unwanted" children. As one US commentator noted: "When adoption looks like exploitation and maternity homes look like traps, abortion starts to look like rescue."
And extreme proposals, like the campaign to declare abortion a human right, can be useful in presenting abortion up to birth (in certain circumstances) as a compromise between abortion as a human right and (allegedly) losing all abortion "rights".
This is despite the fact that the human right to life from conception is enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights; regardless, amendment by amendment, abortion is gradually becoming legal - the modern equivalent of morally right. As seen, BPAS, which supports abortion up to birth, has called for the "at-home abortion" limit to be raised to 12 weeks.
However, while supporting Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi's amendment to decriminalise self-abortion, they rejected fellow Labour MP Stella Creasy's amendment - "which would have removed criminal penalties for medical professionals as well as women, and established abortion access as a human right" - as "going a bit far".
Clearly, even an extreme measure may succeed if an even more extreme measure is offered alongside it - as happened when MPs rejected Creasy's attempt to make abortion a human right but voted to decriminalise self-abortion up to birth.
Already, some are campaigning for decriminalisation to apply to parties other than the pregnant mother: the BMA's medical ethics committee deputy chairman, welcoming the passage of the Crime and Policing Bill, described it as "an important and vital step towards ending the persecution of women seeking terminations in England and Wales and ensuring abortion be viewed as a medical procedure not a crime."
The BMA had long regarded abortion as "a healthcare matter, not one for the police and the criminal courts", and "[b]eyond this bill" they would "continue to push for wider reform of abortion law - including campaigning for the removal of criminal sanctions for medical professionals involved in abortions as part of their clinical practice", as well as "the removal of criteria for an abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy."
Clearly, the slippery slope to complete decriminalisation is being greased, and media stories of women being "stigmatised" for having abortions will doubtless be followed by calls to treat abortion as just another "healthcare matter".
Back in the 1960s, exempting abortion from prosecution on certain grounds seemed less extreme than backstreet abortion, to which, campaigners warned, desperate women would flock; they claimed that the law saved no babies but only took the lives of women. Post-1967, maternal mortality statistics contradicted such claims, while statistics for legal abortion showed a huge rise from a low initial base, although attempts to restrict it failed.
The pills-by-post system, in abandoning in-person assessments, effectively reintroduced backstreet abortion - but with an estimated 54,000 hospitalisations. And yet the Government continues to withhold safety reports, with annual abortion figures only available up to 2022; unaccountable delays suggest they are horrendously high.
All this implies the ultimate objective: the removal of all legal barriers - not the protection of women and certainly not the protection of babies.
The 1967 Act, rather than protecting women, protected doctors from prosecution. One ground for abortion was foetal disability; and when the "stigma" of abortion up to birth is finally eliminated, we can compete with Iceland, which claims to have almost eliminated Down syndrome, whereas we eliminate only 91% of cases every year.
The elimination of all disabled babies cannot be accomplished under a law that only allows early abortion. However, late abortion may not be the endpoint. Abortion up to birth offers the opportunity for newborns to be inspected and, if appropriate, "allowed to die" - less extreme than starving disabled adults to death, although a "finalising" injection might be better than watching infants starve to death. Infanticide? Maybe the confluence of eugenics and late abortion is not such a coincidence after all.
This is not to suggest that all abortion advocates are eugenicists, simply that the feminist "trust the woman" argument, which allows abortion with no restrictions whatever, is proving useful in delivering eugenics - and even though "a woman's right to choose" means allowing the abortion of unborn baby girls, it sounds better than exterminating the "unfit" before birth.
And maybe it's not such a coincidence that, despite an overall increase in material prosperity, the world is a much greyer place. According to the eugenics worldview, having almost "eliminated Down syndrome", humanity should be abounding with joy. But how many wars have been caused by people with Down's - how many stock market crashes - how many strikes - how many genocides?
No child deserves to be punished for not being "perfect". In these days of "diversity", perhaps we need more people with Down's, not fewer. Maybe it's time to declare them a "protected species".