YouTuber Jesse Ridgway did not expect to become the most hated man on the internet.
The New Jersey-based content creator, known to his eight million subscribers as McJuggerNuggets, posted a heartfelt statement on Instagram Wednesday revealing that he and his wife Ashley had terminated their pregnancy after prenatal testing confirmed the fetus had Trisomy 21 — better known as Down syndrome.
He said the decision was “not made lightly,” described the experience as “extremely traumatic,” and asked for understanding from his audience.
What he got instead was a tsunami.
Within 24 hours, the post had been viewed over 17.5 million times on X. Conservative commentator Matt Walsh called it “the most evil thing I’ve ever read on this platform.” Anti-abortion activist Abby Johnson labeled Jesse “a monster of a man.”
Religious critics told Ashley she “doesn’t deserve to be a mother” and that the couple was going to hell. The death threats poured in so fast and so viciously that the Ridgways — a grieving couple who had just lost a pregnancy — started sleeping with a loaded gun on the bedside table.
Let that sink in for a second.
Now here’s the question nobody seems to be asking: if Jesse Ridgway lived in Tokyo, Seoul, or Beijing, would any of this have happened?
The short answer is almost certainly no. And the reason why tells us something fascinating — and uncomfortable — about the cultural values that quietly shape what we consider a moral outrage.
Why America Exploded
To understand the fury directed at the Ridgways, you have to understand what abortion means in the American context.
In the United States, the debate over terminating a pregnancy is not just a medical conversation — it is a deeply religious and political one, supercharged by decades of culture war.
At the heart of the pro-life movement is a Judeo-Christian belief that every human life — from the moment of conception — is sacred and made in the image of God.
Under this worldview, a foetus with Down syndrome is not a medical condition to be managed; it is a person, full stop. Terminating that pregnancy is not a difficult decision — it is, to many believers, a sin. Some go further and call it eugenics: the deliberate elimination of people deemed “less than.”
This is why the Ridgways were compared to Hitler. This is why strangers sent them death threats. This is why a private medical decision made by two grieving people in New Jersey became a national flashpoint overnight.
Add to this the post-Roe vs. Wade landscape, where abortion is now a live political grenade in every US state, and you have all the ingredients for an explosion. The Ridgways did not just share their story — they accidentally walked into a minefield that has been building for decades.
Meanwhile, in East Asia: in China, Japan, and South Korea — societies shaped not by the Bible but by thousands of years of Confucian philosophy — the reaction to a story like the Ridgways’ would be almost the opposite.
In these cultures, the dominant question is not “Is the fetus a person?” It is “What is best for the family?”
Confucianism, the ethical tradition that underpins much of East Asian social life, does not grant the fetus the same moral status as a born human being. Life is generally understood to begin at birth, not conception.
More importantly, Confucian ethics are fundamentally about relationships and social harmony — the duty to your parents, your spouse, your children, and your community. A decision like the Ridgways’ would be weighed against those responsibilities, not against a divine commandment.
In this framework, bringing a severely disabled child into the world — knowing the enormous emotional, financial, and social burden it would place on the family — can actually be seen as the irresponsible choice.
Choosing to terminate, by contrast, is understood as a sorrowful but pragmatic act of care for the family unit. As scholar Philip J. Ivanhoe argues in his landmark study of Confucian bioethics, what most distinguishes a Confucian approach to abortion is “a refusal to treat it as a moral dilemma that stands free of the myriad social conditions” surrounding it.
The numbers back this up. In China, studies show that approximately 95 per cent of pregnancies are terminated after a Down syndrome diagnosis — a figure comparable to Denmark, and far higher than the US average of around 67 per cent.
And critically, the ethical debate that rages in America over these decisions is, as one Chinese social media user put it bluntly, “practically non-existent” in China. The same user noted: “In foreign countries, many mothers raise kids with Down syndrome because their religion does not allow them to abort the baby.”
In Japan, the cultural approach is different again. Buddhism — which coexists with Confucian values across much of East Asia — does not treat abortion as murder, but as a “necessary sorrow.”
Japanese parents who terminate pregnancies can participate in a Buddhist memorial ritual called mizuko kuyō, which allows them to grieve and seek spiritual peace for the lost child. It is a recognition that the decision is painful, not that it is evil.
South Korea, which has a larger Christian population than its neighbours, sits somewhere in between. But even there, research shows that Christian women are significantly less likely than their Confucian counterparts to have an abortion — confirming that it is religious affiliation, not geography alone, that drives the moral outrage.
Two Worlds, One Decision
None of this is to say that one cultural framework is right and the other is wrong. Disability advocates make a powerful point when they argue that high termination rates for Down syndrome reflect a failure of society to support disabled people and their families — not just a personal choice. That critique applies in East Asia just as much as it does in the West.
But the Ridgway story is a vivid illustration of how the same decision — made by the same kind of people, for the same kind of reasons — can be received in completely different ways depending on where you live and what your society believes about life, family, and God.
In America, Jesse and Ashley Ridgway are villains to millions of people. They are sleeping with a gun by their bed because they made a medical decision about their own pregnancy.
In China, Japan, or South Korea, they would most likely be seen as a couple who faced an unimaginable situation and made the best choice they could for their family. People might feel sorry for them. Nobody would be sending death threats.
The internet made the Ridgways’ private grief into a global spectacle. But the rage that followed is not a universal human response — it is a specifically Western one, forged in centuries of religious conviction about what life is, who counts as a person, and who gets to decide.
That is worth remembering the next time a story like this breaks the internet.
The author is an associate professor at Peking University, China.
- This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of CodeBlue.
