(LifeSiteNews) — YouTuber Jesse Ridgway, who announced on X last week that he and his wife Ashley had aborted their baby boy because he was diagnosed with Down syndrome, has been facing massive backlash – and he is doubling down on his eugenic justifications.
The backlash, however, is not only from the public – but from his own in-laws. The couple married in October 2025.
As I covered in this space last week, Ridgway was met by a wave of comments from parents and loved ones of people with Down syndrome appalled by his statement, which reduced his son to a list of possible complications and the conclusion that he was glad he and his wife “had the choice” to abort him.
Ridgway, however, is now trawling for sympathy both in mainstream media interviews and in follow-up livestreams, in which he cherry-picks the particularly vile comments (that anyone engaged in discussion on X is familiar with) and stating that he is now sleeping with a gun nearby due to online threats.
Ridgway has claimed that even members of his wife’s family have been appalled by what they did and have also publicly condemned their act. “Her family has been nowhere to be found,” Ridgeway wrote on Facebook on Monday. “Some even going as far as joining in on the bandwagon hate PUBLICLY, kicking her while she’s down at her lowest point.”
According to the YouTube, his wife’s family is blaming him for the abortion. “She has received text messages from her family accusing me of abuse and that I’m brainwashing her,” Ridgway wrote, stating that her family even “issued ultimatums that she needs to LEAVE IMMEDIATELY.” Her family, he wrote, are reacting “as if she’s not even blood. No backbone, just cowardice as they accuse me of making the decision and controlling/manipulating her over all the years of being together.”
Their decision to abort their baby, Ridgway concluded, has created a break in the family. “We’ve put up with a lot of s–t, but when it’s your own family exercising their bitterness and turning their backs when it matters the most, it really reveals everything about their character. When you’re MIA, complicit and offensive during the hardest times of our life then you will never deserve to be there when it’s good.”
At the end of another livestream, Ridgway restated his justification for aborting his son in the most explicit terms. “I’m glad my dad didn’t f___g terminate me,” he said. “But I’m normal.”
In short: He is glad that his parents did not make the decision to abort him, but he does not have a disability. He does not have Down syndrome. He is worthy of life. His son, who had Down syndrome, was not “normal.” Therefore, he was not worthy of life. Under pressure, Ridgway has shifted from talking about their alleged heartbreak to dismissing the lives of those who are not normal.
And let’s be clear: Ridgway is not availing himself of the twisted “pro-choice” justifications that most people use when confronted with this question. He is not claiming that his child was not a child; in his follow-up defense on X, he stated that “I’ve never seen such hate and vitriol for two people grieving the loss of their unborn child and making an impossible decision.”
The Ridgways knew that their baby boy was a baby. They had him killed anyways, at 21 weeks, when he was old enough to hear their voices, feel pain, suck his thumb, and do somersaults in the womb. They knew he was a baby, but because he wasn’t “normal,” they had him destroyed. They didn’t “lose” him, and the decision wasn’t “impossible.” After all, they made it, after monetizing his short life online for clicks.
“You’re always just trying to make the best decision you can to benefit your child and your own life,” Ridgway told one media outlet. “The second I started to get confronted with stat after stat after stat, and when I realized that more than likely I will have to bury my son, that is not what I wanted to sign up for.”
Ridgway didn’t want to his son to die young, so his son was killed as a baby. He didn’t want to bury his son, so he didn’t—he had him thrown away as medical waste, instead. This grim story reveals where the eugenic worldview always leads: to garbage cans filled with discarded, disabled children. In this story, not even his own in-laws are not appalled.
