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On Disability, Down Syndrome, and Abortion

On Disability, Down Syndrome, and Abortion

Last updated on: June 10, 2026 at 9:58 pm by Mary Pezzulo

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On Disability, Down Syndrome, and Abortion 2026-06-10T21:58:27-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

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a drawing of the genes of a person with Down Syndrome. The 21st chromosome, with three copies instead of a pair, is highlighted in red

An image of the genes of a person with Down Syndrome. The 21st chromosome, with three copies instead of a pair, is highlighted in red. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, in the public domain.

I’m going to lift my moratorium on talking about abortion, for just a minute, because this is about more than abortion.

You probably already know that I reported quite a bit on the pro-life movement during the first Trump term. I quite accidentally became big-fish-in-a-small-pond famous for reporting on the horrific behavior of Frank Pavone, Abby Johnson, and others. I am a Catholic. I want to safeguard life. If you wanted me to help you get an abortion, I’d say “no.” But because of the behavior of the pro-life movement during our country’s violent surge into authoritarianism, I can’t support the pro-life movement anymore. I’ve been stuck in a strange limbo being yelled at by both sides of the issue over this. And I’ve quite frankly been traumatized by the harassment and by having to research all those terrible images of a stolen stillborn baby corpse from the Pavone case. So, abortion isn’t my beat right now. But I have to talk about it today.

I do not know Jesse and Ashley Ridgway. I don’t follow their content online. This is the first I’ve ever heard of them. Apparently they are famous content creators with millions of followers on Youtube, and apparently Ashley was pregnant. That’s all I knew when the news of their abortion blew up.

The couple announced on YouTube that they had gotten an abortion, which makes me extremely sad. They said that they got an abortion because the baby was diagnosed with Trisomy 21, commonly known as Down Syndrome. And that makes me much sadder, because I’ve known and loved people with Down syndrome. Down syndrome is not a plague or a disgrace. People with Trisomy 21 are people, important and interesting people, who have so much to contribute to our society.

I am also very sad, and angry, that after this announcement, the couple was inundated with harassment and death threats, which absolutely never should have happened. No one deserves that kind of abuse. I’m continually angry that a movement which claims to be all about life and love and family will start attacking people and try to do as much harm as they can at the slightest provocation. This is one of the thousand reasons I, as a Catholic, want to leave the so-called “pro-life movement” behind and build a culture that actually does value life in all its stages the way we as Catholics are supposed to do. The movement is rotten.

My heart goes out to the Ridgways for what sounds like a heartbreaking and traumatic situation.

Now, that said, people claiming that the Ridgways’ abortion is “none of our business” don’t make very much sense to me either, because they voluntarily chose to talk about it in public, knowing that millions would see it. At this point, we’re allowed to have an opinion.

After I heard about the abortion and its aftermath, I looked into what the couple had actually said about their choice. And that’s when I went from sad and angry to furious– not at them, but at our society and the way we think about disability.

You can read Jesse’s statement here. It says in part: “When I first confronted this news, I was shocked but optimistic. If they’re a little slow intellectually, then we’ll make it work. I signed on to be a parent, come what may…but I just didn’t fully understand what Down Syndrome entailed. Once we made it public, it became clear that MOST people don’t know what Down Syndrome entails (and no, it’s not the same as Autism): 50% of babies with DS have heart defects. 75% will have hearing challenges. Over 50% will have vision problems. Impaired immune function, developmental disabilities, learning disabilities, delayed physical development, poor muscle tone, structural issues with face, decreased lifespan, etc…Sadly, the list is long, feel free to look it up…Down Syndome isn’t a “blessing”, it is objectively shitty from a health perspective. I didn’t realize just how rough it is for the child, let alone the family…more often than not, they would be fully dependent on others for the rest of their life.”

First of all, you shouldn’t refer to people with an intellectual disability as “a little slow.” I don’t think Jesse meant to be harmful, but the phrase “a little slow” is offensive for the same reason the r-word is offensive. It perpetuates belittling stereotypes about intellectual disabilities. An intellectual disability changes the way you learn and think in profound ways, but it doesn’t make you “slow,” as if you just need to take twice as long repeating every grade and graduate when you’re 36. It doesn’t mean that the disabled gentleman who bags your groceries or works at your school or rides the bus home with you needs to be talked to in a slow, stilted baby talk voice, or that you have to repeat your instructions to them ten times in a patronizing way. It doesn’t mean that they’ll move slowly or react slowly either, as any exhausted caregiver can tell you. “Slow” is a misnomer that needs to stop. Intellectually disabled people aren’t slow.

I’m also angry that they mentioned that Trisomy 21 is “not the same as Autism.” I, myself, am autistic. I’m proud to be autistic, and I also understand that autism is a complicated and difficult condition for many people. I know that people with higher functioning autism like me are sometimes held up as “the good kind of disabled people,” the kind that assimilate and don’t need much support. This pits us against the rest of the disabled community, including other autistic people with higher needs, and it makes people with invisible disabilities less likely to get the support we need as well. Scoffing “no, it’s not the same as autism” when you describe a medical condition betrays that you rank disabled people as valuable according to how well we fit in, and that’s not right. Again, I don’t think Jesse thought about it that way. But everyone needs to stop doing it.

I’m also angry that the Ridgways didn’t know that Down Syndrome is a condition of the whole body instead of just the brain. This isn’t their fault either, of course. It’s how Trisomy 21 is talked about most of the time. I think if you pulled the average person off the street and asked them to describe Down Syndrome, they’d probably talk about the intellectual disability and some of the more visible physical characteristics– the appearance of the eyes and the fingers, perhaps. We live in a lookist society that ranks people according to appearance, and we also live in a society that has a very strong bias against people with a measurable intellectual difference– just look at how people like Elon Musk boast about IQ scores. Having an intellectual disability is still viewed as disgraceful in a way that having a disability in your heart or endocrine system is not. That’s why people typically know that a person with Down Syndrome is very likely to be intellectually disabled, but might not know about the heart defects, the hearing and vision risks, the sleep apnea, and so on.

This whole situation is really a testament to how our society disvalues people with mental and intellectual disabilities.

Suppose that you’d never heard of Down Syndrome. Now, suppose you heard that there was a common genetic condition that occurs in about one in 800 people, that caused a baby to be born with a one in two chance of heart defects, with poor muscle tone, hearing and sight issues, endocrine disorders, developmental differences and a shortened life span– but you weren’t told about the brain symptoms. I think your response would be compassion and wanting to find a treatment. Sure, many people would still choose abortion if they’d never heard of Down Syndrome but had those symptoms described to them. But I don’t think that 9 in 10 babies with that condition would be aborted. I think, instead, there’d be a much greater push of research towards mitigating the symptoms so that these people could live as normal a life as possible, and much greater understanding and accommodation when people met a person with that condition.

What if our society actually valued intellectually disabled people as much as anybody else?

What if, if you heard that somebody had something the matter with their brain that made it likely they’d need a special school and the help of a caregiver when they’re adults, you still thought of them as every bit as human and worthy of respect as a typical person? Because that’s true, you know. Intellectually disabled people are your equals.

What would the world look like if we treated intellectually disabled people like our equals? And I mean not just people who meet your idea of “a little slow,” but everybody, no matter what their level of ability?

Start working towards that world. Because that’s the world that ought to be.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows an d Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

Steel Magnificat operates almost entirely on tips. To tip the author, donate to “The Little Portion” on paypal or Mary Pezzulo on venmo

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