When a YouTube personality named Jesse Ridgway recently announced that he and his wife had terminated a pregnancy after a Down syndrome diagnosis, millions of people had something to say. I am one of them. But I am not here to talk about Jesse Ridgway. I am here to let my son John's words and life respond.
When my wife and I learned that our son John had Down syndrome, the covering OB came into the room and said, "I'm so sorry, I have bad news for you. It appears your son may have a slight case of Down syndrome." A cardiologist added, matter-of-factly, "They try to save many of these babies nowadays."
Then a family member, someone who loved us and was trying to help, offered what she thought was an encouraging thought. She said that nowadays these people were doing more. That someday John could grow up to push a broom at Burger King.
I have two other sons. When each of them was born, I believed everything was possible. They could grow up to play centerfield for the New York Yankees. For John, the ceiling being offered was a broom.
That is what we were up against from the first day of his life. Not cruelty. Not malice. Just a world that had already decided what John could and couldn't do, before he had drawn ten breaths.
The medical facts about Down syndrome are real, and they are not the whole picture. They never are. John needed intestinal bypass surgery on day three of his life. Before he was three months old, he had open-heart surgery. He struggled with coordination and speech, and learned sign language to communicate. He wears special contact lenses to manage keratoconus and hearing aids for progressive hearing loss.
All of that is true. Here is what else is true.
John Cronin is a 30-year-old entrepreneur. Together, we built John's Crazy Socks, a social enterprise that has shipped to customers in 94 countries and donated more than $850,000 to charitable causes. The young man who could not speak is now a sought-after keynote speaker who has addressed the United States Congress, the United Nations, and hundreds of audiences across the country. Forbes named him to their 30 Under 30 list. EY named him an Entrepreneur of the Year, the first person with Down syndrome to receive that honor.
Last week, John spent a day on Capitol Hill meeting with legislators. He came home and left again to compete in the New York State Special Olympics State Games in track and field. Last night, he was out with his brother and friends at a watch party for the Knicks.
This is not a story about an exceptional case. It is a story about what becomes possible when we refuse to let a diagnosis set the ceiling.
Too often, medical professionals focus only on the challenges. They give parents an accurate list of what may go wrong, without any sense of what a full life with Down syndrome can look like. Parents, already frightened, absorb that information and carry it forward. It shapes what they hope for. It shapes what they allow themselves to imagine.
Parents facing this diagnosis deserve the full picture. They deserve to hear about the medical challenges, yes. They also deserve to hear about the joy, the humor, the love, the contribution, the irreplaceable presence that a person with Down syndrome brings into the world.
We should never be blinded by a person's limitations. We should be awed by their possibilities.
Our expanding ability to test, to screen, to select offers the seductive promise that we can engineer away uncertainty. But that carefully designed child, healthy and built to specification, could still grow up to struggle with depression, addiction, loneliness, or heartbreak. Life has always found a way to confound our plans. We never truly know what we are getting. What we know is that every life, shaped by its own challenges and possibilities, has the capacity to surprise us if we let it.
I will not tell anyone what decision to make. That is not my place. But I will tell you what I know.
My name is Mark Cronin. I have a son named John. And I will let John speak for himself.
"Some guy named Jesse said people with Down syndrome don't have good lives. My name is John Cronin. I have Down syndrome. I have a great life. My life is worth living."
