Social Media Mourns Gordon Ramsay's Wife's Miscarriage

It’s a snap to see the very worst in life on social media. Just fire up your Twitter account and take it all in. You might need a “Silkwood” shower later, though.

Political catfights. Fat/body/fill-in-the-blank shaming. Expletive rants you’d never say to someone’s face … but you don’t mind sending them into cyber-space for all to see. These aren’t rare occurrences. It’s what users see every day, assuming they follow more than a handful of their dearest friends.

It’s why this week’s social media mourning for a celebrity miscarriage actually meant something … special. Real. Life-affirming.

Celebrity cook Gordon Ramsay is known for his kitchen caterwauling. Think Simon Cowell with a spatula. Howard Stern wielding stainless steel tongs.

He could be the last celebrity one thinks about when you’re imagining someone to break bread with … in a cordial fashion, mind you.

Yet when Ramsay’s wife Tana miscarried their fifth child the results were, frankly, anything but sour.

BuzzSumo.com, a major site dedicated to measuring social media traffic, showed that stories recounting the loss got massive shares online.

Five major outlets stories covering the couple’s sad news drew roughly 10K shares each. Ramsay later thanked his fans on Facebook for their kind wishes.

People never got the chance to meet the unborn child. Nor do 99.999 percent of those sharing the article know the Ramsay family personally.

Here’s betting many of those sharing the news were parents themselves. Perhaps they, too, suffered the loss of an unborn child or knew someone dear to them who did.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter that the Ramsay family is rich and famous. They’re just parents, like the rest of us, and they’re in mourning.

The abortion debate continues to rage in our culture. That won’t end anytime soon, no matter who gets elected over the next few years or whatever pro-abortion movie celebrities craft.

Every few years we get a “Juno,” the 2007 film which showed a young woman who decides to keep her child and let a kindly couple adopt him or her.

Then, we’ll watch a comedy like “Obvious Child,” which in 2014 offered a virtual PSA on the reasons abortion should be legal.

What the social media mourning tells us is that many people recognize the value, the humanity, of children lost before being born. And Hollywood can’t change that, no matter what movies it produces for our pleasure.