A cast member on Netflix’s third season of the hit show “Love is Blind” had a visceral reaction when his fiancé asked him about potentially aborting their child if the baby tests positive for a “birth defect.”
While cast member Nancy Rodriguez said she would want to have the child aborted in her womb and “try again” for another baby, her fiancé Bartise Bowden said he could “never,” and just wants to “love that kid no matter what.”
“What would you do if you did find out that your child had a birth defect and you could abort the pregnancy? Do you want to keep the baby?” Rodriguez asked her partner.
Bowden, without skipping a beat, chimed in, “F*** no — yeah, keep the baby. What the — yeah, I could not — f*** no.”
“They could be a boy [or a] girl, they could be transgender, they could do whatever, but I just wanna love that kid no matter what — three legs, whatever comes out, is gonna be our kid,” he emphasized.
“I think it’s different for me,” Rodriguez replied, citing her speech pathology work with children who have Down syndrome and other special needs.
“There are so many complications, medical and also learning complications,” she said, adding, “I’ve seen the amount of trauma that it does to the family.”
“For me, if I knew I could try again and hope that the second time is better, I would go that route,” she told Bowden, who looked concerned.
“I would never — I could never do that, especially knowing we were trying to have a kid — just abort mission because they were gonna have some challenges, and we’re gonna have some challenges,” he strongly reacted. “I’m mentally tough enough to handle whatever challenges that may present, and I could just never pull the plug like that.”
“That’s f***ing rough, I could not do that, I’m sorry,” Bowden told Rodriguez. “The whole abortion thing — I couldn’t — no.”
His fiancé went on to suggest abortion should be legal for any reason. “I think, I have no say, in like, anyone’s body,” Rodriguez said. “If you need to have any abortion for whatever X, Y, Z reason: have it.”
Later in the show, the subject of abortion and specifically Rodriguez’s views on aborting special needs children came up in front of Bowden’s family. His sister reacted strongly too, and started to cry on camera when she heard Rodriguez’s position, a moment that seemed to stay with Bowden.
“[F]or my sister, who went to college and was in a program that was specifically geared to tending to special needs children, I knew it was going to be a problem if it got brought up at the dinner table, which it did,” Bowden told TV Insider.
“The idea was the child that we planned on having was going to be terminated because it would be a problem for us — it’s like a way of taking the easy way out,” he added.
