This year I spent a long Easter weekend in the Spanish city of Burgos. I saw more people with Down’s syndrome or who were severely disabled in those few days than during a whole year in the UK. And it wasn’t a one-off – it’s something I have noticed before when visiting other Spanish cities. In Seville, I once found myself in a lively bar in which a table was packed with individuals who had Down’s syndrome downing their beers; a sight I have yet to see in the UK, where 90 per cent of people who know their unborn child will have Down’s syndrome choose an abortion, as the BBC reports.

It means people with Down’s syndrome may well be eradicated in the UK, as is close to occurring in Finland, where (the BBC notes) “almost everyone screens” for Down’s syndrome and “100 per cent of women who have a positive diagnosis now terminate”.

Our society is sleepwalking into the type of eugenic practices made infamous by the Nazis, as much as we would like to distance ourselves and justify our actions as entirely different, cloaking them under talk of progress and human liberty. The eugenics shift underway in the UK finds its clearest expression in the legislation being pushed for assisted suicide – in the form of Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill – and for abortion up to birth through changes to the Crime and Policing Bill, which would decriminalise a woman causing her own abortion at any stage of her pregnancy.

These legislative efforts are clearly not the same as the Nazis’ nihilistic totalitarian programme, but proposing such changes to the UK’s legal and moral landscape is not as unrelated to the horrors that went before as most people would like to think. Too many people are embracing a policy of eugenics by justifying it under other labels or by way of evasion and omission, and avoiding the issues at stake.

Since abortion was legalised in the UK in 1968, there have been a total of 10.9 million abortions of lives judged not worthy of life. It’s a colossal number, whatever your view of what exactly it is that has been aborted. Strikingly, in what appears a macabre coincidence, in the same time frame, 10.7 million immigrants have come to the UK, having been deemed worthy and of “use” to society.

As Miriam Cates noted in the Daily Telegraph, during 2023 (the most recent year for which data is available) there were 299,614 abortions in the UK, representing the highest annual number since abortion was legalised, and an 11 per cent increase from the previous high in 2022.

“This revelation is not just another official data dump; behind the numbers are 300,000 more lives that will never be lived,” Cates puts it in terms that too many people never consider.

She goes on to note – highlighting what is too often a blind spot for the Right and for those against abortion – that “there is nothing to be gained by blaming individual women for Britain’s tragic abortion statistics” as “the law allows their choice, and our shared culture and economic conditions shape their decision”.

The UK’s increasing numbers of abortions also include mounting evidence of sex-selective abortion occurring in the UK, with female foetuses being aborted due to preference being given to male offspring among certain communities comprising first- and second-generation immigrants from the Indian subcontinent. The Daily Telegraph notes that the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), which provides abortions to more than 100,000 women across the UK annually, has even suggested that termination on the grounds of “foetal sex” isn’t illegal.

The trenchant one-way position on abortion held by so many British institutions, such as BPAS, speaks to how our shared culture is increasingly eugenical in its outlook and approach. I found myself confronting this sad fact partly due to my long-range pilgrimage (LRP) in Germany. The months spent crossing the country, including reading about and encountering Germany’s history and crucial role in two world wars, resulted in me pondering how in the UK we constantly refer to the Nazis and how terrible they were.

We do this not without justification, obviously, as we must never forget what can happen to a seemingly ordered society (many of whose members, including members of the Nazi Party, were Catholic). But I started to wonder if our focus on the Nazis’ horrors could also be a way of distracting from our own evils. By obsessing over the Nazis, it can be a way of avoiding having to look more closely at our own conduct; we constantly project it onto others – the Nazis – and leave it at that.

But it’s not as clean-cut as that. Like the Nazis, today we are increasingly obsessed with perfection and with human beauty and aesthetic standards, while increasingly unwilling to tolerate the frailties and physical faults of the Untermensch – a term promoted by the Nazis – those underlings, weaker and less attractive members of society.

“There is a particular kind of modern person who, upon encountering the messiness of human life, its sheer ungovernable profusion, and the suffering it entails, recoils not with pity or solidarity but with disgust,” Colin Redemer wrote in First Things. “And because disgust is rarely accepted as its own justification, such a person dresses his disgust in the language of optimisation, selection, species-level improvement – that is, eugenics.”

But the mainstream doesn’t call it that. It comes under other “empowering” labels such as “women’s reproductive health”, “dignity in death” and “individual autonomy and choice” – while when we do talk about eugenics, we just roll out the Nazis and their evil ways to illustrate how much better we are.

We appear very confident of ourselves and of the robustness of our behaviour and judgement – hence the apparent bafflement of those supporting assisted suicide that a change in the law could possibly go awry. But evidence from countries that have pushed ahead with legalising assisted suicide indicates the very real risks of the slippery slope in effect.

Canada’s MAID programme – medically assisted dying – has seen the homeless, mentally ill and depressed offered assisted suicide. In 2024, as the British Medical Journal reported, MAID accounted for one in 20 deaths – 5 per cent – in Canada. This represents an increase from previous years, with 4.7 per cent in 2023, 4.1 per cent in 2022 and 3.3 per cent in 2021.

The British Medical Journal notes that the Netherlands remains the country with the highest uptake of assisted suicide, with 9,068 assisted suicides in 2023, or 5.4 per cent of all registered deaths. Uptake in the Netherlands also continues to rise, it notes, growing by about 8 per cent a year, 22 years after the practice was legalised.

As with the legalisation of abortion – the numbers don’t stay at a low, contained level. The trajectory is one way. As it is with what is deemed permissible. Hence the accompanying growth of and support for surrogacy and for technological advancements around artificial wombs, womb transplants, gene editing and “procreative beneficence” – the selection of beneficial traits (as opposed to screening out genetic diseases) to give an embryo the so-called best genetic prospects, which critics describe as “designer babies”.

It is Huxley’s Brave New World of eugenics embraced, with the consequent social inequality and loss of human diversity. And one not dissimilar to the “perfect” society dreamt of by the Nazi regime as they relaxed and breathed in the heady Bavarian air at Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s alpine retreat during the Third Reich, when the possibilities seemed boundless.

We shouldn’t forget that part of the reason for the Nazis’ initial success was that they appealed to wholesome values – chivalry, dignity, knowledge, beauty – before, as Jessi Jezewska Stevens describes in the introduction to the New York Review Books English translation of Ernst Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs, originally published in 1939 and seen by many as an allegorical warning about Germany’s direction under Nazi rule, entirely perverting them. While the resulting horrors of the Nazi regime will continue to scream out from the history books, the ability and desire to pervert the good was not unique to them. It can still happen.

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James Jeffrey is a former British Army officer. He is a writer, editor and a Camino guide.