Candice Lewis, who was born with multiple disabilities, lives in a small Newfoundland community. When she was hospitalized last year, two doctors pressured her to agree to be euthanized and strongly suggested it to her mother.

“It was obvious she was going through conditions, etcetera, which may have been very, very great,” explains Alex Schadenberg of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition (EPC). “But the fact is that there was no request for euthanasia, and as you know, in Canada euthanasia is legal now. There was no request, there was no desire for this, but there was pressure from the doctors.”

Lewis was ultimately transferred to another hospital where doctors found the problem was simply a need to adjust her medication. She is now doing better than ever and recently participated in her sister’s wedding.

As for euthanasia, Schadenberg says proponents claim it is all about personal choice, but that is a big lie.

“That’s one of the big cultural lies that they sell us because, in fact, what it is is that it gives the doctor the right in law to cause your death. And once the doctor has that power, you have to understand that goes along with their own attitudes, their own levels of discrimination, their own feelings,” the EPC executive points out. “Obviously the doctors were saying, ‘I wouldn’t want to live like you, Candice.'”

Yet Candice wants to live, and her family does not want to be deprived of the joy she bring them.

Meanwhile, the Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom (CCHF) thinks the eradication of Down syndrome births is sending Iceland on the way to eugenics.

Eugenics is by definition a science that deals with the improvement (as by control of human mating) of hereditary qualities of a race or breed. CCHF President Twila Brase puts it another way.

“Eugenics means that there is an attempt to perfect the human race and to take out imperfections,” she explains. “With Iceland, they have decided to push prenatal testing, and most of the women who find out that they are having a child with Down syndrome … terminate the birth,” Brase reports. “We believe this is just the beginning of the different genetic imperfections and other imperfections that could be found before the baby is actually born.”

And the CCHF president tells OneNewsNow the test in Iceland is only 85 percent accurate, “which means, of course, that what is likely happening is that some children are testing as though they have Down syndrome and they do not, and the Icelandic women are terminating children that do not have Down syndrome. And they don’t even know it, because Iceland does report that there are some children still being born with Down syndrome, and it’s a result of the test being inaccurate.”

So she concludes that the test “can be inaccurate one way as well as the other way.”