Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 23 November 2017

Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution

Obstetric Medicine in the Netherlands: Professor Sjef Gevers and Professor Eva Pajkrt, University of Amsterdam

2:00 pm

Professor Eva Pajkrt:

No. I only looked them up for my own region. We have those data. Where a baby is diagnosed with Down's syndrome, a little more than 80% will be terminated, 10% will decease during pregnancy - even if people carry on, some of their babies will die before they are born - and 10% will be live born. I was referring to a group of people who wanted screening. There is a large group of people who, even if we say that a baby shows signs of Down's syndrome, will just say "Okay". They do not want an intervention or a prenatal diagnosis. They will just go along with it. Our maternal age has been increasing, so maybe we have been terminating more Down's syndrome babies, but it is stable.

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