There Must Be Blood

On abortion and the universal constant of human sacrifice

This spring, an American YouTube entrepreneur and his wife, accustomed to turning every other aspect of their life into Content, decided to do the same with their birth journey. After the initial reaction video, the gender reveal, the ultrasound showing the baby developed to a quite visibly babyish stage, they were crushed to learn he probably had Trisomy 21. I will not link to the video they subsequently made where the diagnosis was confirmed. The YouTuber opens the report on his phone while his wife is already crying in fearful anticipation. When he reads it out, she begins wailing. The contrast between her cries and his attempt to keep up a painfully stilted little stream of Content Creator patter for the camera is excruciating. They’d been hoping for a “little ray of sunlight,” he tells us, but this was obviously not that.

This week, he made a long Twitter post explaining to his audience that they had made “the very difficult decision to terminate the pregnancy.” The whole post is just as eerie and depressing as you would imagine, including an obligatory “we appreciate you” to fans who have autism, Down’s syndrome, etc. and might find this announcement disturbing (you think?) He’s glad their parents didn’t kill them in utero, but he and his wife have simply made a different choice. They hope for “a better outcome” in the future. After the backlash, he returned with an indignant followup congratulating himself for the “bravery” to start this “conversation.”

Richard Dawkins once said that when he affirmed the basic commonsensical goodness of targeted abortion for children with disabilities, he was saying nothing controversial. He was simply saying the quiet part out loud for all the parents who share exactly his view but are a little too embarrassed to admit it in public. I thought Dawkins’s view was repulsive, but I also didn’t think he was that wrong about the social reality. In the US, it’s estimated that something like 2/3 of babies who receive a prenatal diagnosis of Down’s Syndrome are aborted. (Meanwhile, in Iceland, only a couple of babies per year will survive the diagnosis to birth.)

The eugenicist pundit Richard Hanania is always lurking around the corner to chime in ghoulishly whenever there’s a new discourse about killing disabled babies. Right on cue he popped up again here to inform everyone that only the super-duper “religious” would say this couple is wrong, but thankfully, most normal people are ignoring them. Richard himself has shared with the class that having children of his own has only made him more pro-choice, and it’s just lucky that he and his wife never got a bad prenatal diagnosis. Phew.

Now, I don’t actually believe Richard is correct about this. I’m positive you could find cases of couples who were not super-duper Christian or religious but simply had a strong human intuition that killing their baby was not a thing they should do. As we’ve also seen in the euthanasia discourse, various disability rights groups even pride themselves on making their case without recourse to religious principles. (Whether they’re borrowing without wanting to admit it is a separate question.)

What is true, however, is that it is very difficult for couples to choose life outside of a collective body willing to make that choice together with them. I don’t just mean economically difficult. This couple, the Ridgways, are multi-millionaires. One of the first videos to pop up if you visit their channel is a tour of their million-dollar lake house. Suffice it to say, theirs was not a decision made out of financial distress. They do not need friends with money. What they need, and apparently lack, are friends willing and able to normalize suffering.

Heartbreakingly, it appears that the people in the Ridgways’ life—friends, medical professionals—told them the precise opposite of what they needed to hear. Instead of “You’re not weird to want this baby. This is a good thing. Let’s celebrate together,” they heard, “This will ruin your life. This will ruin your child’s life. There’s a simple way to make this go away.”

By chance, yesterday the algorithm fed me this clip from a podcast with Sam Harris and Winston Marshall, in which Harris rehashes his usual complaints about society’s perplexing inability to move on from the Abrahamic religions. Marshall puts it to him that the story of Christ’s passion has endured because “it is the ultimate story of suffering, and suffering is the human universal.” But it’s more than a story of a suffering, Harris counters. It’s a story of human sacrifice. And goodness knows everyone moved on from that long ago. Didn’t we?