The internet got a glimpse of something ancient and ugly creeping back into modern life this week. YouTuber Jesse Ridgway and his wife, Ashley, announced on social media that they had aborted their unborn child after learning the baby might have Down syndrome.
Ridgway, whose post now has more than 21 million views on X alone, defended the decision by pointing to the medical complications often associated with Down syndrome: heart defects, hearing problems, and developmental delays. “Down Syndrome isn’t a ‘blessing,’” he wrote. “It is objectively sh-tty from a health perspective.”
When I read his post, the first person I thought about was my little sister-in-law, Valentina. Valentina, now 6 years old, was born with Down syndrome. She’s had heart surgery and ear surgery — two concerns Ridgway listed. Yet Valentina is the ultimate joy of the Duffy family I married into. She’s the unquestioned favorite among all nine Duffy children. She loves music, having her hair done like her big sisters, and wearing “pretty dresses.”
But when I first learned she would likely have Down syndrome, I didn’t know any of that. Back in 2020, during a date night when my now-wife Evita told me her unborn sister likely had Down syndrome, my reaction, if I’m honest, wasn’t that different from Ridgway’s.
I would never have considered abortion, but I pitied the Duffy family. I thought the news was tragic, and I assumed everyone’s life was about to become harder and sadder. I especially remember thinking Valentina might never live independently.
Today, my in-laws, Sean and Rachel Duffy, affectionately call Valentina their “lifer” because they treasure that, unlike their other children, Valentina will always stay home with them. The Duffy kids actually argue over who will get to take care of Valentina one day when Sean and Rachel are gone.
Looking back now, what strikes me is how instinctively warped my reaction was. I grew up in a Christian, pro-life home. I had a Christian education. I always considered myself pro-life. Yet the beauty and innate dignity of Valentina’s life were not immediately obvious to me.
Why? Because the air we breathe is no longer Christian. It’s pagan.
As Federalist Senior Editor John Daniel Davidson explains in his book Pagan America, the ancient pagan world routinely disposed of weak, disabled, or unwanted children. Romans abandoned “imperfect” infants on roadsides and garbage heaps. The Carthaginians and Aztecs sacrificed children to their gods. In the pagan world, weak lives were burdensome and disposable.
Today, Western countries abort babies diagnosed with Down syndrome at staggering rates, often between 60 and 99 percent. Iceland famously boasts that it has nearly eliminated Down syndrome, with, on average, only one or two babies with Down syndrome born each year. Of course, Iceland didn’t eliminate Down syndrome. It eliminated children with Down syndrome via mass murder.
In countries with socialized medicine, particularly, mothers routinely report pressure from doctors and bureaucrats to abort these babies for the “good” of society. Carrying them to term is treated as irresponsible, selfish, and even cruel. This is paganism resurrected.
The Christian revolution introduced something the ancient world had never known: Imago Dei — the belief that every human being bears the image of God and therefore possesses inherent dignity.
When Christians started rescuing exposed babies left to die outside Roman cities, the Romans were scandalized. To pagan Rome, power determined value. But Christians insisted the helpless, unwanted child was as valuable as the Roman emperor himself.
When Constantine the Great converted to Christianity in 312 A.D., Christians immediately moved to ban the barbaric practice of disposing of infants. Christians built a civilization around the idea that human worth is not earned through intelligence, strength, beauty, productivity, or independence; it is intrinsic.
That same moral inheritance shaped America. It’s no accident the founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “our Creator” endowed human beings with certain unalienable rights, beginning with the right to live. The right to life is ordered before liberty and the pursuit of happiness on purpose — because without life, none of the other rights matter.
Today, Congress has the opportunity to pass legislation that would prohibit abortions performed because a baby has Down syndrome. I’m running for Congress, and if elected, I would gladly vote for such legislation. But laws alone won’t solve this. What we need is moral clarity again.
Ridgway suggested women often hide abortions of their Down syndrome babies to avoid “judgment,” as though public disapproval is the real problem and the goal should be normalizing the practice. We cannot normalize this.
That means saying plainly that what happened here was wrong. You don’t need to lack compassion or express hate toward the Ridgways rather than their sin. But a society that refuses to judge the killing of vulnerable children as immoral is a society that has lost its soul. And I say that as someone who once had the wrong instinct myself.
What makes this so tragic is not only that an innocent child is gone but that Jesse and Ashley will never know the light that child might have brought into their lives. I once had many of the same fears they did about my little sister-in-law Valentina’s Down syndrome diagnosis — and I was wrong. The challenges are real, but so are the extraordinary gifts, and I wish I could have shared that with them.
That’s why testimonies from families like mine matter so much. Just like the Ridgways’ aborted baby, Valentina is not a defect to be screened out of existence. She is not a mistake or a burden to society or to my family. She is a human being who happens to have brought immeasurable joy to everyone around her.
My mother-in-law has a saying that every baby comes into the world carrying a loaf of bread under his or her arm, meaning every child arrives with blessings you cannot foresee. That has been especially true with Valentina. The tragedy is not her life; the tragedy would have been never letting her live it.
