Professor Eva Pajkrt:

With the introduction of prenatal screening, there has been a decrease in the Netherlands. We have two categories for late pregnancy termination. The first category is for lethal cases where the infant, once born, will never survive. The second category is where we feel that if the baby is born, no medical treatment would be warranted because it would be felt that it would be inhumane, unnecessary or however one frames it. We had 18 cases of the first category in 2004, it has dropped to three in 2015 and the 2016 report, while it is not here, notes two cases. The rate has dramatically decreased with the introduction of prenatal screening, mainly because many of the diagnoses were of trisomy 18 and trisomy 13 and are now picked up by prenatal screening. The number in the second category has also dropped, but it is more likely to be one or two per year.