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Krystal from 'Endangered Syndrome'Canadian Down Syndrome / Youtube screen grab

November 13, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – In Iceland, people with Down Syndrome have been virtually wiped out by abortion. In Denmark, people with Down syndrome also face extinction. In the United Kingdom, 90% of parents who discover that their pre-born child has Down syndrome opt to have the baby aborted. In the US, 75% of babies diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted. In Canada, it is also close to 90%.

All of this is despite the fact that the vast majority of people with Down syndrome report having an extremely high quality of life, exposing the empty and evil excuses of some abortive parents that abortion is “best for the baby” as the transparent lie that it is. Life expectancy has also gone up steadily: Now, people with Down syndrome generally live to about sixty years old, with some living into their seventies. Their life expectancy post-birth has skyrocketed just as their life expectancy pre-birth plummets.

That is precisely why the Canadian Down Syndrome Society (CDSS) is attempting to draw attention to the plight of people with Down syndrome via a daring new campaign, “Endangered syndrome”: They have launched a petition calling for those with Down syndrome to be placed on the “endangered” list, noting that that by the standards of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the Down syndrome community qualifies.

The dwindling Down syndrome community has resulted in dwindling funds for essential community services, the CDSS noted through a video highlighting people dressed as endangered animals while explaining their plight. Animal welfare groups, the CDSS observed, get 90% more funding than Down syndrome charities across North America, a fact that helped drive their controversial comparison—the video has already been viewed more than a million times.

“We’re not saying that we are a community of animals at all,” CDSS spokesperson Ben Tarr told CTV, “we’re just trying to put a comparison in the world that says when someone gets put on the endangered species list they’re given all the support to help that species thrive and that’s what we want for our kids, for our community, is the ability to thrive. It’s a campaign that’s set around raising awareness; this is a community that doesn’t get a huge amount of attention.”

Tarr is speaking from personal experience: His six-year-old son Leo has already had to switch schools three times due to a lack of available resources. Increasingly, these challenges are becoming more difficult for the Down syndrome community to handle as their plight gets largely ignored by the politicians and the mainstream media. After all, to discuss the reason for the near-extinction of people with Down syndrome around the world would be to question the sanctity of abortion—and that is something that tolerant progressive politicians cannot tolerate.

The truth is that there are fewer people with Down syndrome in Canada because we are killing so many of them. Abortion, a physically violent procedure that forcibly extracts a developing child from his or her mother’s womb, is being utilized by those who have discovered that their child has Down syndrome to have that child suctioned, scraped, or pulled from the womb and discarded or incinerated like garbage. In fact, abortion activists defend Canada’s abortion regime by suggesting that abortion needs to remain easily available for women just in case they have such a child.

The CDSS cannot mention this, of course. They appear to be attempting to prick the consciences of the politicians, the media, and society at large, and so they cannot simply come out and say that the Down syndrome community is shrinking because so many babies with Down syndrome are killed simply because they are babies with Down syndrome. But that is the truth of the matter, and the smiling faces of the beautiful people in the campaign video say just that: I am here and I am valuable—even though you had someone just like me killed because you thought you couldn’t love someone just like me.

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Jonathon Van Maren is a public speaker, writer, and pro-life activist. His commentary has been translated into more than eight languages and published widely online as well as print newspapers such as the Jewish Independent, the National Post, the Hamilton Spectator and others. He has received an award for combating anti-Semitism in print from the Jewish organization B’nai Brith. His commentary has been featured on CTV Primetime, Global News, EWTN, and the CBC as well as dozens of radio stations and news outlets in Canada and the United States.

He speaks on a wide variety of cultural topics across North America at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions. Some of these topics include abortion, pornography, the Sexual Revolution, and euthanasia. Jonathon holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in history from Simon Fraser University, and is the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.

Jonathon’s first book, The Culture War, was released in 2016.