The Evangelical Alliance UK is urging caution before a new pre-natal Down's Syndrome test is made more widely available.

The Non-Invasive Prenatal Test (NIPT) is already available in Wales and will be rolled out by the NHS in England next month.

The test will be used by the NHS to establish genetic conditions like Down's syndrome, but parents can also access it via private health care providers to determine their baby's sex.

The BBC reports that NHS doctors in England will not be sharing information concerning the baby's gender when the test is made available.

Jane Fisher, director of Arc Antenatal, a charity that helps parents through antenatal screenings, expressed support for the testing on BBC Radio 4 Today.

She claimed women were 'desperate' to have access to this kind of testing and that delays to rolling out more widely had pushed some women into 'risky testing and potentially risking their baby because they can't access this more accurate form of screening'.

'We have this postcode lottery of women in Wales being able to have it,' she said.

But Abi Jarvis, Public Leadership coordinator at the Evangelical Alliance UK, fears that such testing will increase the number of abortions.

'While the strategist in me would appreciate the opportunity to plan for my family's future, the realist in me believes the statistics indicate that for most people, this plan will take the form of an abortion appointment,' she said. 

She warned that with constant advancements in technology, there was a much wider issue than Down's syndrome and disability, and that it could open the door to even more selective abortions.

'In a society that highly values intelligence, will we one day decide that there is an IQ level so low that it would be better for a child to be aborted?' she said.

'What about people who are blind, or even just short-sighted, in a world where visual mediums like TV and WhatsApp messages are taking over from radio and phone calls?

'People have committed suicide because of bullying over their hair colour – could parents decide that their ginger unborn baby should be aborted?'

Last week, Labour called for a ban on NIPT over concerns that it is leading to gender selective abortions.

Shadow women and equalities minister Naz Shah told the BBC that in communities where boys are preferred over girls, some women feel pressured into using NIPT 'to live up to expectations of family members'.

The comments were in response to an investigation by the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire programme, which found thousands of British women using an online forum to discuss the use of NIPT as a way of determining their baby's sex.

CARE chief executive Nola Leach said the call from the Labour party was 'very welcome'.

'Sex-selective abortion is completely discriminatory and should be explicitly outlawed in UK law,' she said.

'We might have made great progress in society in terms of how we treat those with disabilities but it is utterly wrong that so many babies with Down's syndrome end up being terminated.'