The logical culmination of America’s long-burgeoning abortion culture: permission to kill your children because, God knows, raising them is such a burden.
That’s the main takeaway of the recent case involving Lindsay Clancy, a Duxbury, Massachusetts mom who admitted strangling to death her three children, aged eight months to five years. “I just want to feel happy,” she reportedly wrote on her iPhone three months before murdering them one-by-one.
And yet a jury deadlocked on the case, declining to convict her. In fact, jurors reported later, they voted 11-1 for acquittal, with only a single male juror arguing to hold her legally accountable.
Clancy’s defense: that she suffered from “postpartum psychosis,” rendering her unable to distinguish between right and wrong or control her actions, thereby voiding responsibility.
But the most astounding thing was the thousands of women rallying to her defense nationwide. “I just think we know that any one of us could be sitting in her chair,” a protestor outside the courthouse told WBUR, a public radio station in Boston.
And sure enough, one of them soon will be. Prosecutors say Corrie A. Walsh, a suburban mom in Illinois, was recently charged with murder after allegedly hanging her two-year-old son in the basement. Like those protestors, she had become obsessed with the Clancy case to the point of “actively discussing” it in text messages with friends. And, like Clancy, she later attempted, but failed, to escape accountability by committing suicide.
“She did this to her baby because he was the ‘devil’ and the ‘anti-Christ’, ” the murder charge claims Walsh told police.
Don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of compassion for mentally ill people and understand—better than most—the difficulty of finding them help. My own son, now 38 and long ago diagnosed with grave paranoid schizophrenia, has been in and out of mental institutions, lived as a drug addict on the streets of LA, and spent six months in jail for assault. He has also made numerous suicide attempts and threatened others with harm.
His American mom and I have spent untold hours and tens of thousands of dollars in only partially successful attempts to get him treatment. Thank God he hasn’t yet killed or seriously injured himself or anyone else. But let me say this clearly and unequivocally: if he ever does, the bulk of my sympathies will lie with his victims.
Which brings us to the million-dollar question: why is there so much more pity in today’s America for an emotionally distressed mother who kills her children than there is for the babies she kills? For my money the answer is obvious: the growing culture of abortion pervading my home country.
It hasn’t always been so. Historically, abortions were frowned upon, discouraged, and punished. Then came the late 1960s and, with it, the adoption by many states of reformed laws allowing abortion under certain circumstances. In 1970, New York famously passed an “abortion on demand” law allowing virtually any woman to abort her fetus within the first 24 weeks of pregnancy.
Several other states did the same.
Then came Roe v. Wade, a 1973 Supreme Court decision guaranteeing a woman’s right to abortion in the first trimester, before a fetus attains “viability,” i.e. the likelihood of surviving on its own. That remained the law of the land until 2022, when the court handed those rights back to the states. Which, ironically, opened the door for many of them to allow abortions right up to birth.
“I believe that people deserve choice throughout their whole pregnancies,” one obstetrician-gynecologist recently declared in an interview on PBS television. And indeed, we’ve seen decades of frantic demands for female liberation defined as “my body, my choice.”
So, it’s not too surprising to now see crowds of protestors hailing a largely female jury’s unwillingness to convict a woman for committing what many consider merely an after-birth abortion.
Because she just wanted to feel happy.
I pray for a new trial to set them all straight.
__________________________________________
David Haldane is an American journalist and author with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book is Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.
