Recently, a Netflix TV show called Love is Blind aired a scene between two contestants (Nancy Rodriguez and Bartise Bowden) which is highly offensive and damaging to the disability community. Nancy is speaking with her fiancee Bartise about when to start a family and proceeds to say she would like to start trying sooner or later to avoid defects that can come with having a baby at an older age. She describes her “sad” encounters in her job as a speech therapist with families in the Down syndrome community and says, “For me if I knew that I could try again and hope that the second time, it’s better, then I would go that route.”

Can you imagine any other scenario where it would be deemed acceptable to call another human being, “better?” On a MASSIVE platform? This is unacceptable.

Defending the rights of people with Down syndrome should not be automatically pegged as a political issue. This is NOT a political argument. This is about human rights. Human decency. There are people living with Down Syndrome who will hear her say that people without Down Syndrome are “better.” There are parents within the disability community who heard her say she would dump a child like ours for a “better” model.

Speaking about a group of people as “sad” is insensitive and ignorant. As a speech therapist, this woman works with children who have Down Syndrome and while it is unclear after these statements why she keeps this position when she feels the way she does about the innocent children she treats, Netflix has the power to not air material like this. Decency is more important than ratings. 

Netflix chose to keep this highly offensive material in this program, and has ignored requests to remove it. As a community, we demand that it be removed and that Netflix issue an apology.