Three children are dead at Lindsay Clancy’s hand, yet a rotten culture has rallied to make her the central victim. That reflex exposes a deep connection between Big Pro-Life, feminism, and wokeness. We cannot establish justice until we confront it.
Big Pro-Life insists that a mother who intentionally kills her preborn child is abortion’s “second victim,” not a morally responsible agent. The response to Lindsay Clancy carries that same presumption outside the womb: The mother is centered as victim, and accountability is recast as cruelty.
Hundreds of women have rallied in pink to support her. More than 31,000 donors have given more than $1 million to offset her parents’ costs of standing beside her. Three children are dead at their mother’s hand, yet she has become the central object of public sympathy, solidarity, and financial support.
Whether Clancy lacked criminal responsibility because of genuine mental incapacity must be judged according to evidence and due process. The scandal is that the culture answered that question in her favor before the jury could, directing its emotional energy toward her rather than her three dead children.
Big Pro-Life cannot wash its hands of this spectacle. For decades, it has preached the same moral grammar now displayed outside that courtroom: When a mother murders her child, center her suffering, relocate agency onto doctors, drugs, systems, or circumstances, and treat accountability as another act of cruelty against her.
The Clancy response is not an aberration from the second-victim doctrine, but that doctrine logically extended from preborn children to born children.
The essentially woke character of the second-victim argument is now evident. It imports the hierarchy of intersectionality into the abortion debate: The more firmly someone is placed within a preferred victim class, the less moral agency and culpability she is permitted to possess. Her commission of the act becomes the very basis for treating her as a higher-order victim.
The Feminism at the Heart of Big Pro-Life
This is not an abolitionist caricature. National Right to Life declares that “the pro-life movement recognizes the mother as a second victim in every abortion” and expressly grounds its opposition to punishment or prosecution in that doctrine.
The problem runs deeper than political strategy. Big Pro-Life’s governing commitments are fundamentally secular and feminist, not biblical or according to nature.
Scripture and nature present women as image-bearers endowed with moral agency, mothers bound to protect their children, and persons answerable under the same law as men. Big Pro-Life instead begins with feminist anthropology: The woman is the presumptive victim, guilt is translated into trauma, sin into circumstance, repentance into healing, and accountability into oppression.
It borrows the Christian language of compassion while abandoning the biblical categories that give compassion moral order: sin, guilt, repentance, mercy, justice, punishment, and impartial judgment.
The Abortionist at the Mailbox
Nowhere is the contradiction more apparent than with abortion pills and self-managed abortion.
In a clinic abortion, Big Pro-Life can rhetorically displace the mother’s culpability onto the doctor, clinic, or procedure. But when a woman knowingly procures the drugs, possesses them, and administers them for the purpose of murdering her child, there is no external abortionist onto whom Big Pro-Life can transfer her guilt.
She is literally the abortionist. The victim, intent, and result have not changed.
This is why much of the pro-life establishment organizes its efforts around means, methods, and instruments. It targets manufacturers, distributors, websites, doctors, clinics, shipping channels, gestational limits, pills, and procedures.
But the pill is a method, not the offense. The pill is no more the perpetrator than the gun. The website is a means of procurement, not the injustice. The offense is the intentional murder of an innocent human being, namely prenatal homicide.
By treating abortion as a product to regulate rather than a homicide to judge, Big Pro-Life is condemned to play whack-a-mole with methods. Close the abortion mills and abortion moves to mailboxes. Restrict one drug and another method takes its place. The instruments change because the underlying injustice remains unjudged and the murderer remains protected.
That failure is measurable. Nationally, Guttmacher reports 1,129,650 clinician-provided abortions in 2025 — the highest total since 2009, 21 percent above 2020, and more than 23 percent above 2019.
According to a forthcoming report from the Foundation to Abolish Abortion (@AbolitionistFAA), where I serve as a member of the advisory board, even in the 16 states with general provider bans or six-week provider bans, known abortions involving residents rose from 234,774 in 2019 to 292,533 in 2025, a 25 percent increase. In-state clinic abortions fell from 207,084 to 69,135, but abortions obtained through out-of-state travel rose from 27,690 to 94,390, while telehealth added another 129,008.
More than three-quarters of the known abortions involving residents of these “ban” states now occur through travel or telehealth, and that total excludes an unknown number of self-managed abortions. Big Pro-Life closed clinics, but the abortion industry simply changed its means of delivery.
Oklahoma is an even clearer indictment. Abortions involving Oklahoma residents rose from 4,574 in 2019 to at least 7,017 in 2025, a 53 percent increase. By 2025, Oklahoma had no abortion clinics, yet roughly 3,250 residents traveled out of state and another 3,766 obtained abortions through telehealth. The abortion mill was miniaturized and mailed and the abortionist ingested it slaughtering her precious preborn child.
That migration is legally enabled. Pro-life law is reactionary to abortion innovation. It follows providers, pills, and packages while granting categorical immunity to the abortive mother (even when she performs the abortion itself) before her conduct, intent, or lawful defenses are examined.
Even Americans United for Life acknowledges that “nearly every state explicitly exempts women from the penalties and punishments associated with violating an abortion law.” There is not a single state in America that treats abortion as prenatal homicide. The pro-life legal framework has thereby created a protected class of perpetrators: mothers who intentionally abort their children.
Managing Murder versus Demanding Justice
Abolitionists begin somewhere entirely different: justice.
Who is the victim? What conduct caused the child’s death? Who knowingly participated? With what intent? Was there a lawful defense?
Justice does not change with the method. It begins with the victim and the conduct, not an identity-based immunity established before the facts are considered. It applies the same law, due process, lawful defenses, and standards of culpability to every responsible party: mother, father, doctor, supplier, or accomplice alike.
Maternal immunity does precisely what Scripture forbids: shows partiality to the wicked, employs unequal standards, and turns the weak aside from justice (Psalm 82:2-4; Isaiah 10:1-2; Leviticus 19:35-36; Proverbs 17:15; 18:5; 20:10; Galatians 2:6; James 2:9).
Nor can the scale of abortion be ignored. Guttmacher estimates, based on 2020 abortion rates, that nearly one in four American women will have an abortion by age 45. In a culture where abortion reaches that deeply, the second-victim narrative has a vast constituency personally invested in its promise of absolution. It would be willful blindness to deny that some of the empathy surrounding maternal child-murder is projected and self-protective.
The second-victim narrative offers absolution without confession, forgiveness without repentance, and empathy without judgment. To judge maternal child-murder impartially would threaten the narrative through which millions of women have been taught to interpret their own abortions.
But bloodguilt cannot be cleansed by projected empathy. David did not seek therapeutic affirmation after shedding innocent blood; he cried, “Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God” (Psalm 51:14).
The guilty conscience is cleansed only by the blood of Christ, received through faith; a faith that confesses sin, grieves and hates it, turns from it, and endeavors after new obedience (Proverbs 28:13; Hebrews 9:14; 1 John 1:7-9; 2 Corinthians 7:10-11).
Empathy severed from truth and justice is not compassion, but toxic partiality. It centers the perpetrator, obscures the murdered child, and recasts accountability as an additional injury against the woman. Once empathy decides who may be guilty, the courtroom becomes a theater and justice a prop.
This is feminism’s poisonous contribution to our moral order. Feminism teaches that female suffering cancels female agency, that womanhood confers presumptive victimhood, and that equal accountability is oppression.
Feminism is a toxic blight upon justice and social stability. No society can long endure when sympathy is assigned according to sex, culpability according to intersected rank, and the murdered child disappears behind the anguish of the mother who murdered him.
Big Pro-Life Must Choose: Feminist Partiality or Biblical Justice
Big Pro-Life must confront its fatal flaw. It claims to affirm the full humanity of the child while denying the full moral agency of the mother. It claims to care for the victim while preserving unequal accountability for the perpetrator.
Until it repudiates its secular feminist anthropology and renounces the second-victim doctrine, Big Pro-Life will continue asking which abortion instrument must be prohibited next. Abolitionists demand equal protection and justice for the preborn child, regardless of the instrument.
Yet in every state capitol, permission to murder babies has been written into law.
God condemns rulers who write “iniquitous decrees” that “turn aside the needy from justice” (Isaiah 10:1-2). He commands them to “rescue those being taken away to death” (Proverbs 24:11), appoints them to carry out His wrath against the evildoer (Romans 13:4), and calls unequal standards an abomination (Leviticus 19:35-36; Proverbs 20:10).
Justice — equal weights and equal measures, showing no partiality — is what God demands. We must follow wherever justice leads, regardless of the method employed or the identity of the person who murders the child.
Big Pro-Life must choose between feminist partiality and biblical justice. It cannot have both.
This article was originally published by the author on X.
