Everyone Has Dark Thoughts. Most Don't Kill Their Children.

Lindsay Clancy doesn’t deny strangling each of her children to death, so the fact that she has become an icon and hero to so many women ought to give us pause. After all, it’s one thing to identify mental illness as a causative factor in a horrific crime, but it’s another thing entirely to join a fan club and stand outside the courthouse with a picket sign.

When reading through the pronouncements defending Lindsay, it’s clear that a plethora of women are over-identifying with her, either as mothers who have been overwhelmed at some point, or as women who felt that their health concerns weren’t taken seriously. Perversely, in engaging with such exaggerated empathy for the villain, all empathy is lost for the children who died slowly at her hand. If we can so easily have sympathy for an overwhelmed or depressed mother, why not what it would feel like to know that your own mother is about to kill you, as she just did your closest friend—your brother? The distorted lens that sees merely a vulnerable woman instead of a serial murderer is simultaneously incapable of seeing the humanity of those most vulnerable, confused, and scared children at the end of their short lives.

If we step back and examine the argument directly, we can more easily see the depths of evil, and further how destructive the principal claims would be if they were applied to society broadly. The main posited argument is basically, “I’ve had similar dark thoughts, so she shouldn’t face the full consequences for her actions.” Presumably though, even those women who had such occasional dark thoughts, and who now support Lindsay, did not act on them. Are we to suggest that their inaction is regrettable or at least immaterial? By their current protests, they implicitly assert that they would have been blameless in such an instance, even while their living children demonstrate that they had enough control to choose not to follow through on disturbing impulses. If they had such control, their experiences are not a basis to assert that Lindsay did not.

It’s part of the normal scope of human existence to occasionally have dark fantasies in difficult moments. For example, plenty of teenagers have fantasized about shooting their high school bullies, yet nobody asserts that we should therefore stop punishing school shooters. Plenty of drivers have considered ramming those who cut them off in traffic, yet we still rightly punish those who do. The cost would be incalculable if we were to devolve the justice system into some version of, “Let’s just forgive those who actualize any dark thought we’ve ever had.” It would surrender even the pretense of justice, and would raise empathy for the offender over compassion and justice for the wronged.

We already see that happening to a limited degree, wherein routine criminals are sent for psychiatric help, released after a short time, and then re-offend (creating new victims). But why does Lindsay’s crime generate literal crowds of sympathetic fans and other crimes do not?

This is where we find ourselves contemplating something that none of us want to consider seriously: that Clancy’s supporters are a mere logical extension of the expanding abortion argument. Pro-abortion advocates in recent years have stopped focusing on viability (“It’s okay until X weeks!”) or even on personhood (“It’s just a clump of cells!”). Instead, the focus has been on the autonomy, purported rights, convenience, and choice of the mother. That’s a significant change in messaging.

If the abortion movement now largely exists on the premise that a baby has no right to life because of the burden on his/her mother, on what basis do they draw the line at birth? Ultimately, that is merely a matter of location (inside or outside of the womb). We may, in fact, be moving toward a reality in which some maintain that a child has no fundamental right to life until he reaches a certain age at which he is no longer considered dependent (and therefore burdensome). While plenty of readers may scoff at the suggestion, it was certainly true in older societies that lacked a Christian ethos—why not a future one?

The underlying philosophical claims that we are making about children are having growing consequences on our legal framework and the broader culture. The women who are claiming that Lindsay Clancy was not responsible for her actions might unintentionally result in a distorted understanding of the nature of women too. If their claims were accepted, and we were to assert that women are not responsible for the killing of their children, then we would also eviscerate their claims of agency. If they lack culpability, then they likewise would not be granted legal decision-making either.

Ultimately, how we treat children matters, and a failure to acknowledge the gross injustice of their deaths points to a society that already devalues them as less significant than their attacker. Most villains have complicated stories, whether it be depression, anxiety, broken homes, abusive parents, drug addiction, and the like. Despite those things, we still acknowledge that part of being good is the willingness to use one’s agency to make choices that reject evil temptations. Such people are neither pets nor projects, they are people who must be held to account for the decisions they have made, on both sides of the grave.