The Lindsay Clancy Case Should Make Pro-Lifers Rethink Absolving Mothers Of Murder; Lindsay Clancy’s Pro-Abortion Fans Care More About Her Circumstances Than Her Children

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The Lindsay Clancy Case Should Make Pro-Lifers Rethink Absolving Mothers Of Murder:

The growing calls for compassion and not punishment for Lindsay Clancy should force conservatives to confront their own history of excusing women who kill their children prenatally.

In January 2023, Lindsay Clancy allegedly murdered her three young children — ages 5, 3, and 8 months — and then attempted to take her own life. As details emerged about Clancy’s mental state, postpartum struggles, and the horrific method of killing, many people began speaking about her not as a mother who had murdered her children but as a woman who had been suffering and needed compassion.

Outside the courthouse last week, women gathered — dressed in pink shirts and forming hearts with their hands — as a demonstration of their solidarity with a mother who is on trial for strangling her children. One of the women expressed sympathy and confessed, “It could be me.” A licensed therapist said, “Many of us see ourselves in Lindsay,” and described many women as “one step away” from murdering their children. Those defending Clancy have focused on how the medical system and society failed her. As a result, public sentiment is divided over whether she should be held criminally responsible for the killings.

There is nothing wrong with calling attention to psychosis or demanding accountability from the pharmaceutical industry and medical community for the misuse of potentially harmful medications. But the growing identification with Clancy raises a more pertinent question: Should compassion for a woman who has committed a violent crime lead us to acquit her for it? 

That question presents an uncomfortable mirror for the pro-life movement. Should Clancy’s circumstances transform the perpetrator into a victim and, ultimately, eliminate her criminal culpability? While many conservatives answer that justice for the Clancy children should prevail, conservative culture has operated the opposite way regarding prenatal children. For decades, the pro-life movement has maintained its own category of women who participate in the killing of their children — and its response to them mirrors the rhetoric now used by those trying to excuse Clancy. 

In 2016, Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life, stated: “National Right to Life has long opposed the imposition of penalties on the woman on whom an abortion is attempted or performed.” Then-National Director of Priests for Life Frank Pavone said the pro-life movement doesn’t “aim to imprison” women. Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, and Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of SBA Pro-Life America, together wrote that they “emphatically” oppose “prosecuting women for abortion.”

The reason for this position within the pro-life movement is similar to those defending Clancy: Women who seek abortions are victims too. According to prominent pro-life leaders, women who obtain abortions are often victims of a lack of support, cultural pressures, relationship instability, or deception from the abortion industry. Whatever the circumstances, the woman herself is generally exempt from criminal penalties for intentionally killing her preborn child.

There is a long history of the pro-life movement promoting the idea of women being victims of abortion. John C. Willke, a formative pro-life pioneer and one of the earliest leaders of National Right to Life, wrote in his 1985 book Abortion Questions & Answers in response to a question on a Constitutional amendment: “We don’t know of a single pro-life or pro-abortion leader, or church leader, or congressman, or member of Parliament in any nation, who would want [women to be punished]. The mother is the second victim; she needs help and love — not punishment. No, women would not be punished.” --->READ MORE HERE

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Lindsay Clancy’s Pro-Abortion Fans Care More About Her Circumstances Than Her Children

The Clancy case raises a larger moral question: What happens when circumstances become the rationale for defending the unthinkable?

In response to the ongoing trial of Lindsay Clancy, the woman who killed her three children in 2023, it seems women across the country are trying to quiet their consciences by swapping out pink pussy hats for pink T-shirts. These sympathizers have also raised more than $1 million for Clancy’s supportive parents. That stunning sum is akin to awarding a Golden Globe to an actress who publicly credits killing her offspring with advancing her career.

Was Clancy pro-abortion? Maybe she was. Maybe she wasn’t. Either way, the more revealing question isn’t what Clancy believed about abortion; it’s what the women rallying around her believe about when it’s morally acceptable to take innocent life. Thus, scarier than the woman in the courtroom, sitting in a wheelchair and staring blankly into space, are the hordes of women who may be finding solace and justification for the intentional ending of innocent human life somewhere else in the life cycle.

Is invoking Clancy’s mental illness to mitigate responsibility for her actions fundamentally different from invoking “health care” to justify abortion because a woman believes giving birth would cause her undue stress or derail her professional life? Abortion supporters can cite “reproductive freedom” all they want. That’s how it starts. The methodical murder of more than 65 million unborn human beings since Roe v. Wade is nothing more than permissible slaughter. But more important than which euphemisms we use for abortion and filicide is the message being sent to women who may come to believe that their overwhelming circumstances justify disposing of the unborn.

Under this moral framework, the prohibition is no longer simply, “It is wrong to intentionally end an innocent human life.” It has become, “It is wrong — unless circumstances make it permissible.” Even research on homicidal violence has identified this moral threshold: Many people condemn homicidal violence in principle, while identifying circumstances where they find it permissible. This concept applies to the Clancy case, where her female supporters appear to argue that even the irreversible decision to strangle three children is defensible based on circumstances.

For those who wonder, “How could the Nazis have killed 6 million Jews?” the answer becomes clearer when we see women rallying around a person who, one after another, wrapped colorful resistance bands around three children’s throats, applied sustained pressure, compressed the structures in their necks until they died, and then moved on to the next child. 

Regardless of the verdict, the Clancy case is tragic. According to the defense presented on Clancy’s behalf, she committed the inconceivable while in the grip of a deeply disordered mind. But even there, another “who decides?” emerges: Who determines when a disordered mind is sufficiently disordered to excuse criminal responsibility? --->READ MORE HERE

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