Rome Would Have Recognized Jesse Ridgway
Christians have always been clear on abortion.
On June 3, a YouTuber named Jesse Ridgway, who has spent two decades building an audience of more than four million people under the name McJuggerNuggets (I know what you are thinking… but trust me this is an important debate), posted a message explaining that he and his wife Ashley had ended their pregnancy after a prenatal test came back showing their son had Trisomy 21, the chromosomal condition most of us know as Down syndrome.
He did not hide the decision or grieve it privately. He had already filmed the moment the two of them received the results, Ashley’s face falling on camera, and now he wrote a long public statement laying out the reasoning. “Down Syndrome isn't a 'blessing,' it is objectively shitty from a health perspective” he explained, and most people do not understand what it entails; the child would likely be dependent on others for the rest of his life; genetic counselors had told them that up to ninety percent of women terminate after this diagnosis. “Thankfully,” he wrote, “we had a choice.”
The post passed seventeen million views within days, and when the condemnation came, much of it cruel and some of it threatening, he answered with what he plainly considered the unanswerable point. “A couple's abortion is suddenly newsworthy in 2026? There are over 1,000,000 abortions every single year for a myriad of reasons. This is happening on a daily basis and is the most common outcome for trisomy 21, yet this one blows up and people are surprised?”
I have no interest in adding to the hate or alleged death threats the Ridgways received. What caught my attention was not the post but the reply section beneath it, where a particular argument kept surfacing among the people defending the decision. “This was a private and personal choice”, they said, the kind of thing reasonable people of different faiths and convictions will always weigh differently. And then a more specific version, offered by Christians: that the faith itself has never spoken with one voice here, that believers have disagreed about when life begins since the beginning, and that a sincere follower of Jesus can land on either side of it. You hear this more and more, and you hear it from serious people. James Talarico, the Presbyterian seminarian who just won the Democratic Senate nomination in Texas, put the clean version of it plainly: “Jesus never talks about abortion. The Bible is silent on abortion.” People of good faith, he says, arrive at different moral conclusions, and the church has lost its tolerance for that disagreement.
That last claim is the one worth taking up, because unlike a question of private conscience it is a historical claim, and historical claims can be checked. The trouble for the people making it is that the history does not cooperate. The witness of the early church on this question is not a chorus of competing voices that later hardened into a party line. It is closer to the opposite. The conviction was so settled, so early, and so plainly drawn from Scripture that the church later wrote it, without hedging, into the document it handed people who showed up on their first day.
A faith built on the image of God
We need to begin with the foundation, in the first chapter of the Bible, because the Christian conviction about the unborn grows out of the very first claims about humanity. Genesis says that God made us in his own image, male and female, and the claim has become so familiar that it is easy to miss how strange it once was. The ancient world did not believe that every human being carried equal and intrinsic worth. Worth was a function of status and usefulness, the strong ranked over the weak, the citizen over the slave, the wanted newborn over the sickly or inconvenient one. Into that world came a people, first Israel and then the church, insisting that the emperor and the slave, the philosopher and the infant, the strong and the disabled all bore the same divine image and so possessed the same dignity that no one had the standing to revoke. This was a novelty, and as much as anything else it is what set the faith apart from the religions and philosophies around it. The historians who have gone looking for where our modern idea of universal human rights actually came from keep arriving at this same root, the conviction that dignity is not granted by the state or earned by ability but stamped on every person by their Maker from the beginning. Remove the image of God and the claim that all human beings are equal in worth has nothing left to stand on. Christianity did not reason its way to human dignity from neutral premises. It received dignity as revelation and carried it into a world that had never assumed it.
And the image is there in the womb
That universal dignity is the soil everything else grows in. The same thread that runs from the Law through the Prophets and into the Gospels treats the child in the womb not as potential life but as a person already known by God, already carrying the image. The psalmist tells God, “You formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb,” and then says something the modern debate tends to skip past, that God’s eyes saw his unformed substance, the unshaped thing, before any of his days had come to be (Psalm 139:13, 16). The Lord opens his call to Jeremiah by reaching back behind the prophet’s birth entirely: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you” (Jeremiah 1:5). And then the thread arrives in the New Testament, in the one scene that ought to give Talarico’s argument the most trouble, because it is the very passage he leans on. He cites the Annunciation, Mary’s consent to Gabriel, as proof that creation requires consent and therefore that the Bible is on his side. But set that blasphemy aside for a second and read one scene further. When the newly pregnant Mary greets her cousin Elizabeth, the unborn John jumps in his mother’s womb, Elizabeth says he “leaped for joy” at the sound of Mary’s voice (Luke 1:41, 44). The first human being to recognize the incarnate Christ did so while both of them were still in the womb. Luke, a physician writing with care, uses the same word, brephos, for John unborn that he uses a chapter later for the newborn Jesus lying in the manger and later still for the infants people bring to be blessed (Luke 1:44; 2:12, 16; 18:15). Scripture does not change its noun at the moment of birth, because Scripture does not change its mind about who is there.
Running alongside all of this, from Sinai onward, is the command that needs no decoding, the prohibition on taking innocent life, the refusal of the hands that shed innocent blood that the Lord is said to hate (Exodus 20:13; Proverbs 6:16-17). Set the two convictions side by side, the image of God borne by every human being and the standing ban on spilling innocent blood, and the conclusion is simple, no need for a council or creed. A Christian holding nothing but the opening of Genesis, the Psalms, the Prophets, and the Gospel of Luke has everything needed to know that the deliberate ending of a life in the womb is the ending of a person God already made, already knew, and already loved. The early church did not need a supplement to reach this. The clarity was already in the texts.
A lost manual, and what it confirmed
So why does the manual matter, if Scripture already settles it? Because of what its existence reveals, and because of how its rediscovery happened, which is one of the most interesting stories in the history of the church.
For most of Christian history the Didache, the “Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,” was a mystery. The early fathers had quoted it and named it. Eusebius and Athanasius both knew it by title. But the text itself had vanished, and for centuries scholars knew its contents only in echoes, in the places where later writers seemed to be leaning on something older that no one could any longer read. Then in 1873 a Greek Orthodox bishop named Philotheos Bryennios, working through a codex in a library in Constantinople, found the whole thing, copied out by a notary named Leon in the year 1056 and sitting unremarked for eight centuries. When it was published it caused something close to a sensation, because it pushed the window into the earliest Christian communities back further than almost anything outside the New Testament, into the late first or early second century, the world of the apostles’ own students.
What made it remarkable was how many things it confirmed. Here, in black and white, was the command to baptize “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” one of the earliest written appearances of the Trinitarian formula, distilling what Matthew’s Gospel records and what the church had always confessed (Didache 7). Here were the earliest Eucharistic prayers we possess outside the New Testament, with their theology of thanksgiving. And here, at the close of those prayers, was a single Aramaic word, Maranatha, “O Lord, come,” the same cry Paul records at the end of First Corinthians (16:22). I have written before about how much weight that little word carries, because a Greek-speaking church preserving an Aramaic prayer addressed to Jesus as Lord is a window into a Christology that was high and early and not the invention of later councils. The Didache did not give the church new doctrines. It confirmed, in a document the apostles’ own students could have held, the doctrines the church had carried all along.
You can read that article here:
Crystal clear
Which brings us to the line that the comment-section theologians and keyboard warriors would prefer did not exist. In its opening section, the part scholars call the Two Ways, the Didache lays out the path of life over against the path of death. This opening section was a catechism, which is simply the basic teaching a new believer was walked through before baptism, the starter lesson in what it meant to follow Jesus. Among the very first commands on the path of life is this: “You shall not murder a child by abortion, nor kill it once it is born” (Didache 2:2). There is no hedge in it. There is no qualification about the stage of pregnancy, no distinction between a formed and an unformed child, no carve-out for hard diagnoses or for choice. The killing in the womb and the killing of the newborn are named in a single breath as the same act against the same neighbor.
Now hold that next to the claim that “Christianity was always of two minds here”. If the question had been genuinely open in the early church, you would expect the beginner’s manual to be where the ambiguity shows, to footnote it, to soften it, to leave it for the mature to sort out. Instead it is stated flatly, at the entry level, as part of the floor a person had to stand on to call themselves a Christian at all. This catechism was the baseline handed to everyone, the lowest common denominator of the faith, and that is precisely what makes it such damaging evidence for the “diversity thesis”. The protection of unborn life was not a fringe idea. It was just a line in the orientation packet.
Nothing new under the sun…
Jesse Ridgway is not an aberration from human history. He is a return to its default, the very default that Christianity built a legacy interrupting. Romans would reconize the calculations he made public, that a child who is wanted and convenient may be kept and a child who is not may be judged less than a person and killed, in the womb by a potion or after birth on the doorstep. The Latin for raising a child, tollere liberum, literally meant to lift it up off the ground, the gesture by which a Roman chose to keep a newborn rather than leave it exposed to die. You see, CHOOSING whether or not a child is worth raising is not new. We have just moved modernized the vocabulary to make it about compassion, choice, freedom... The logic is no less barbaric and a new convert walking into a Christian church out of that pagan world had to be told, in plain words, that the way of life forbids what Rome permitted and expected, because the way of life had a different account of who that child in the womb actually was. The catechism distills the Scriptures, echoes them plainly, and repeats them regularly to leave no doubt among new believers.
Finally, let me address the obvious dismissal of this document: “Well, if it were that good of a book it would be Scripture. It isn’t so it is heresy.” The problem is that early church fathers did not work with a simple binary of in or out of the canon. They held at least three categories, and the distinction between two of them has been lost on most modern readers: there was Scripture, the canon, the revealed deposit; there was a second tier of writings useful and even appointed for the instruction of believers without being Scripture; and there was a third category of the genuinely heretical, the texts judged harmful and rejected outright. The man who arguably did more than any other to fix the first category drew the line himself. In his Letter of 367, Athanasius of Alexandria produced the earliest list we have of exactly the twenty-seven New Testament books the church still holds, and in the same letter he named a further class of books “appointed by the fathers to be read” by those coming into the faith, and he placed the Didache there. Non-canonical is not a synonym for rejected. The Didache’s place outside the Bible is not a degradation of its teaching; it is an exact statement of what kind of book it is, a manual for new Christians who had not yet connected the dots that the Scriptures themselves had already drawn.
A faith that defends children
So set the record straight. Christianity has not held a diversity of opinion on this. It has held a conviction, drawn plainly from Scripture and written into its earliest teaching, and alongside that conviction it has only ever had heretics, a small minority, who have never lasted long, and who have by definition placed themselves outside the faith they claimed. The line was never between two equally Christian readings. It was between the church and the people who left it.
What has actually marked someone as a Christian, across twenty centuries and on every continent, is not our words but our actions. Not a Sunday service but a posture toward the weak. The historian Tom Holland, who was no apologist and came to the subject as a skeptic, documents in Dominion how the arrival of Christianity changed what the ancient world thought it owed to its most disposable members, the exposed infant left to die on the hillside, the unwanted daughter, the slave, the woman, the poor. The pagan world found the Christian refusal to expose children bizarre, even antisocial. The church kept doing it anyway, gathering up the babies that Rome threw away, because it believed each of them bore the image of the God who knit them together. Astoundingly, he actually found that you could trace the growth of the early Christian church by finding which provinces changed laws to better protect vulnerable women and children. That instinct, to run toward the discarded child rather than past him, is one of the few things that has reliably identified the faith from the catacombs to now.
We are living in an age that is inventing fresh ways to decide which humans are too costly to keep. It begins with the inconvenient child in the womb, especially the one whose test results come back wrong, and it does not end there; the same logic is already expanding the practice of assisted death well past the dying elderly to the depressed, the disabled, the merely tired of living. Jesse Ridgway said the quiet part without flinching: “thankfully, we had a choice”. A culture that hears that and nods is a culture learning to sort its people by usefulness. The Christian answer to it is not a new, political, or hate filled departure from an earlier more diverse accepting faith. Our regard for the dignity of all life and our willingness to protect it all costs is the oldest thing we have. Even written into the manual we once handed every new believer. It is good. It demands clarity where others want nuance, and courage where others want compliance, and it asks us to defend the lives that might cost us dearly, the disabled life and the dependent life and the unborn life and the old life, not because those lives are useful and not because we are special, but because every one of them bears the image of God, the God who made them and knew them before they drew a breath.
Jesse Ridgway’s son was one of those lives.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.
I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.
I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.
My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina with our 4 kids.
Absolutely Brilliant!