(LifeSiteNews) — In uplifting news out of Spain, 45-year-old Mar Galcerán has been elected to the Corts Valencianes, the parliament for that region of the country on the regional ticket for the conservative People’s Party. Galcerán has been involved in politics since the age of 18, when she first joined the party, and was sworn in last September. She told the Guardian that her victory is “unprecedented,” and she’s right—Galcerán is the first parliamentarian with Down syndrome in Europe.
“Welcome Mar. Great news for politics, overcoming barriers,” People’s Party leader Carlos Mazón wrote on social media. Agustín Matía Amor of the Down syndrome advocacy group Down España concurred, noting that the victory is groundbreaking: “We haven’t heard of anyone else. It’s a huge step forward and an example of real inclusion.”
Galcerán isn’t the only politician with Down syndrome elected in Spain—in 2013, Ángela Bachiller became city councillor in Valladolid. But this is another glass ceiling broken for an incredibly marginalized group.
“Society is starting to see that people with Down syndrome have a lot to contribute. But it’s a very long road,” Galcerán said. “You find all sorts on social media. There are people who support me. But there are also those who think I’m not capable. But these are people who don’t know me or my background. I want people to see me as a person, not just for my disability.
Indeed, during her more than twenty years in politics, Galcerán has worked on “inclusion for those with intellectual disabilities,” including “four years at Asindown, an organisation that supports children with Down syndrome.” That support is badly needed—there is perhaps no group of human beings in the world more threatened than those with Down syndrome, and thus Galcerán’s election provides badly-needed visibility for a vulnerable group under threat from a society increasingly in thrall to abortion-enabled eugenics.
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In 2020, The Atlantic published an essay by Sarah Zhang titled “The Last Children of Down Syndrome.” Universal prenatal screening in Denmark has led to the near- total elimination of people with Down syndrome—the National Institutes of Health noted in 2007 that “Denmark halves Down’s births,” and that trend, Zhang observed, has escalated. “Prenatal testing is changing who gets born and who doesn’t,” she wrote. “This is just the beginning.”
It isn’t just Denmark. Depending on which study you read, at least 75% of children diagnosed with Down syndrome before birth in the United States are killed by abortion. In the United Kingdom, it is 90%. In Canada, numbers are similar, with the Canadian Down Syndrome Society asking to be placed on the “endangered” list to draw attention to their plight. In Iceland, people with Down syndrome have been aborted almost to extinction. And in Ireland, where until recently more faces with Down syndrome could be seen out and about than anywhere else in the West, the number is approaching 95% just a few years after abortion has been legalized.
Despite deceitful declarations of opposition to ableism, much of the Western world has adopted the attitude of atheist and eugenicist Richard Dawkins, who stated in 2014 that it would be “immoral” not to kill a child with Down syndrome in the womb and that his advice would be to “abort it and try again.”
This makes Mar Galcerán’s election genuinely meaningful in a way that few political victories are. Our society practices lethal discrimination against people just like her every day, often on the pathetic pretence that it is “compassionate” to kill those with disabilities in the womb. Galcerán’s public profile and parliamentary presence are a stern rebuke to that insidious lie.
