The media’s portrayal of people with Down syndrome has grown more positive in recent years, with featured stories of people with Down syndrome that highlight their achievements. Many of these are published on March 21 — World Down Syndrome Day — and rightly so.
People who have Down syndrome don’t fit into a box. They have a variety of skill sets and abilities. Some may require 24-hour care, others may live their lives with their parents, while others may have jobs, live on their own, and get married. Each person’s story is different — which is what makes life the amazing miracle that it is. No two people are exactly alike. Yet, major media news outlets are still hypocritical when it comes to how they treat human beings with Down syndrome.
21 march World Down Syndrome Day, vector
While even the pro-abortion media celebrates life with Down syndrome on World Down syndrome Day, the rest of the year it advocates for the killing of preborn children with Down syndrome by abortion.
On the one hand, the media rightly celebrates people with Down syndrome as human beings, as individuals with their own skill sets and abilities. But on the other hand, it pounces on any pro-life law that does not provide the “exceptions” that would allow for aborting babies who receive a diagnosis like Down syndrome.
Reducing people to “numbers”
In May of 2023, MSNBC featured a story on Mia Armstrong, a girl with Down syndrome, discussing Mattel’s first ever Barbie doll with Down syndrome. It’s a sweet story and MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle was all smiles with Mia and her mom. Is it great that Mattel made a doll with Down syndrome? Yes. Is it wonderful that MSNBC celebrated it and spoke to a little girl about it? Yes.
But it’s also likely that if Mia’s mother had wanted an abortion and been denied one, MSNBC would have defended her right to have that very same person killed before birth.
In contrast, here’s an example of how MSNBC has reported on abortion and a fetal diagnosis of Down syndrome.
In 2015, an Ohio bill to disallow abortion specifically for a preborn child’s diagnosis of Down syndrome was under debate. MSNBC complained that this bill and others like it have “placed limits on this freedom [abortion].”
In other words, a bill to prohibit aborting a baby solely on the diagnosis of Down syndrome was framed as ‘limiting a woman’s freedom’ — to kill her baby for having Down syndrome.
Seema Iyer, the host of MSNBC’s The Docket, spoke with Ohio Right to Life Executive Director Michael Gonidakis about the bill, and while he cited that 90% of babies with Down syndrome are being aborted, she responded that The Global Down Syndrome Foundation in 2012 said it was only 67% to 85% — as if these statistics aren’t also tragic and extremely high.
Iyer went on to say, “Let’s take the dead babies out of the equation and for you and your side in terms of the politics of it. Is it just this way for Republicans and conservatives to criminalize abortion and therefore, you’re just winning based on the numbers alone because if you take out the 9 out of 10 babies being aborted, more babies live and then your side wins?”
Gonidakis responded, “Well, we all win when more babies are born…”
To which Iyer replied, “[E]verybody has a different opinion about that… I just want to take the babies out of the equation and talk about the numbers…(emphasis added).”
Keep in mind, this conversation was specifically about a bill to protect children with Down syndrome from abortion and Iyer is reducing those children down to “numbers” and only wanted to speak of them as “numbers.” She certainly didn’t want to acknowledge them as people when she argued that ‘only 67%’ of them are killed by abortion.
Killing people is not health care
In 2023, CNN published an article entitled, “More people with Down syndrome are living longer, but medical systems aren’t keeping up.” The article complained about a lack of quality of health care for individuals with Down syndrome and how doctors often ignore a patient’s concerns. CNN is right that this would be discrimination.
But just four years prior, in 2019, CNN published a puff piece in which it interviewed two abortionists about abortions late in pregnancy and why they occur. One of the abortionists, Dr. Jennifer Conti, said, “There are many reasons why women may need to access abortion later in pregnancy, including maternal health endangerment, diagnosis of fetal abnormalities or restrictive laws delaying earlier access to abortion care (emphasis added).”
So while CNN was, on the one hand, ready to fight for the rights of people with Down syndrome to have access to quality health care, it was also willing to fight for the false right for a preborn child to be killed because she has Down syndrome — as though abortion were a health care treatment for the condition.
Arguing that people with Down syndrome need better health care while also arguing that killing them in the womb is health care is cognitive dissonance.
Celebrating born children while condoning the deaths of preborn children
ABC News likes to share when athletes with Down syndrome have their time in the spotlight.
In November, it shared the story of Kayleigh Williamson, an athlete with Down syndrome who ran the NYC marathon, which is amazing. And last month, it shared the story of Jacoby Egloff, who “wowed a crowd at the end of a basketball game…” when he scored a basket after the other team passed it to him. It’s always worth celebrating the long-fought-for inclusion of athletes with Down syndrome. ABC anchor David Muir even proclaimed, “the sky’s the limit” for them.
And while ABC News appears to share a wide range of positive and impactful stories about Down syndrome, it also shared the story of a woman who wanted to abort her baby with Down syndrome.
The article is written from a standpoint of support for that abortion because her baby had Down syndrome and other health conditions. Though ABC News reported, “There was an 87% chance the baby had Down syndrome” (not a definitive diagnosis) and that none of the conditions on their own would “warrant a termination…,” it essentially promoted the intentional death of the child because she had Down syndrome. The baby’s mother, Shannon, told ABC News, “Even if she did survive to term, it would be unlikely she’d survived through labor. And if she did survive through labor, then we’d be looking at multiple corrective surgeries immediately after birth.”
Killing children is not medical care, ABC News, and is not what doctors should ever do to avoid performing surgeries on patients.
The pro-abortion media is perfectly willing to use stories of born people with Down syndrome to get clicks and likes, and to discuss the ways they face discrimination — yet it ignores the blatant eugenics and discrimination being carried out against children with Down syndrome in the womb.
People with Down syndrome deserve so much better than being used as feel-good cover stories while behind the scenes, the same media helps to keep the target on their backs.
