Medical science has made remarkable progress in recent years in attempting to cure and even eradicate diseases. Doctors who do so can change the world and billionaires want to help them. The Gates Foundation, run by Bill and Melinda Gates, has committed itself to eradicating malaria. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife have pledged US$3 billion to rid the world of disease.

But Down’s syndrome is not a disease. It is a condition. Yet the situation has now developed whereby doctors may well come close to engineering a population free of Down’s.

The UK National Screening Committee has backed a new, highly accurate prenatal test for Down’s syndrome for use in the NHS. The test is already available in the private sector where the number of abortions on the grounds that the babies have Down’s has soared. In other countries where the test is already in full use, no Down’s babies are being born, because of terminations.  

This week actress Sally Phillips has used a television documentary to highlight the test and its outcome – the end of Down’s children. People with Down’s have an extra copy of chromosome 21 in each cell, and the varied effects can be impossible to predict.