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.”
It’s no wonder that after decades of prominent pro-life leaders casting women as victims in prenatal homicide cases, some in the culture now extend the same reasoning to women accused of murdering their born children. Clancy’s supporters claim she was a victim of hormones, prescription medication, depression, and even her husband framing her for the crime. Much like the pro-life view of women in abortion cases, this perspective assumes that postpartum women who commit violent acts are driven by extenuating circumstances and are therefore less culpable than someone who commits the same crime without experiencing those unfortunate circumstances.
However, abortion abolitionists have another explanation for why women commit violent crimes against their children: sin.
Jeremiah 17:9 warns that “the heart is deceitful above all else, and desperately wicked.” Jesus Christ taught that out of the heart flows evil thoughts and murder (Matthew 15:19). Fundamentally, murder is sin (Exodus 20:13). The root problem for women who murder their children — whether postnatally or prenatally — is a sin problem. Medication, poverty, an absent spouse, or hormone imbalance may affect a person’s circumstances, judgment, or behavior, but they do not change the fundamental reality of human nature; they merely exacerbate what is already within a person. While secularism seeks to blame an external factor for a person’s crime, Christianity rejects that diagnosis.
As abolitionist Luke Griffo writes:
Christianity … sees sin as a transgression of God’s holy law, which necessarily must be met with justice. “Sin is lawlessness” (1 John 3:4). … Sin is therefore a legal reality and disobedience to specific, revealed law, which, like any genuine law, demands punishment. Therefore, the great problem man faces is neither social injustice, systemic oppression, nor governmental failure, but his own personal guilt before the God who made him and his liability to judgment.
When society rushes to acquit the guilty in the name of empathy, it invites moral collapse and defies God’s moral order. Ecclesiastes 8:11 warns of this exact danger: “Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily, the heart of the children of man is fully set to do evil.” Instead, murder, regardless of why it was committed, should be punished.
Abolitionists have warned for years that violence against born children will increase the more we normalize the killing of the youngest ones in the womb. After all, if our laws grant a mother legal immunity for intentionally killing her prenatal child, what principle prevents that same immunity from being extended to the killing of her born children?
Maternal filicide will not be solved or handled appropriately until we reckon with the human heart, the reality of sin, and the necessity of justice. And if conservatives are bewildered by the left-wing impulse to excuse women who deliberately murder their born children, we would do well to examine our own house first.
