The first signs that something wonderful was about to happen came in late November 2017: on the cover of Vogue Netherlands—for the first time in the magazine's storied history—appeared a person with Down syndrome. It was Micah, a blond three-year-old posed alongside his blond mother, a model and actress by profession. "What an honor," Amanda Booth wrote on Instagram.
An honor she had earned through years of commitment. For some time, Amanda and her husband Mike Quinones have fought for the rights of people with disabilities and their full recognition in society. The couple understood that a photograph speaks louder than any statement, so they created the Instagram account LifewithMicah to show the world that a child with Down syndrome could live a life exactly like any other child.
Through the Vogue cover and the interviews that followed, we learned that when Amanda and Mike learned they were expecting, they refused prenatal testing and screening. As Amanda explained, such tests "wouldn't have changed anything." Only at Micah's birth did his parents discover his condition—though beyond the characteristic eye shape, there was nothing about the boy's health that immediately suggested trisomy 21. The diagnosis came when he turned three months old. After an initial moment of concern, everything moved forward peacefully. "At first we worried," Amanda said. "We ran through all the terrible things he might face. But as the days went on, we thought about it less and less. Our little man is so incredible that I completely forget about his syndrome."
The cheerful, glamorous Vogue cover was thus one milestone in a journey toward normalcy—both at home and beyond. A journey of acceptance lived fully, above all, by Micah's parents.
The real turning point, the true revolution, came a few months later. In February 2018, the world learned that a child with Down syndrome had been chosen as the brand ambassador for a global advertising campaign aimed at all children, regardless of their chromosomes, skin color, or social status.
Since 2010, Gerber—the undisputed giant of baby food in North America and beyond—has held an annual contest to select the year's spokeschild. That face appears in advertisements, campaigns, and on product packaging. In 2018, the contest winner was Lucas from Dalton, Georgia: eighteen months old and carrying one extra chromosome.
That Gerber chose his face as the most adorable in America from among 140,000 entries first surprised Lucas's mother, Cortney Warren. She told the press she had submitted his photo on a whim—a shot of her son sitting cross-legged in a green shirt and polka-dot bow tie, his expression pure delight. Congratulations poured in from everywhere: from Ann Turner Cook, in her nineties, who had been Gerber's iconic face for decades after being photographed at five months old, and from an anonymous woman on social media who publicly thanked the company: "As an expectant mother of a baby with an extra chromosome, Lucas's news warmed my heart."
When news outlets broke the story in February 2018, a journalist friend of ours proposed to his editor that he write a commentary. "No, enough," the editor replied. "Down syndrome is a trend now." One wonders whether he ever truly grasped what his writer was trying to tell him: that the whole point was precisely this—a person with Down syndrome had been chosen by advertisers as the emblem of fashion for everyone. Editorial subtleties?
Of course, we labor under no illusions. We still live in an era when parents pursue surgery to alter their children's facial features so their disabilities remain invisible (a practice documented in Britain in recent years). We still live in times when—as Alessandra Di Pietro and Paola Tavella recounted in Madri selvagge (Einaudi 2006)—you must justify not having prevented a child with Down syndrome, given that science and medicine have made it possible. Times in which bullying a disabled child is the rule, never the exception.
So no, we are not naive. But Lucas's revolution—an ambassador for all—has opened wondrous, finally human possibilities.