The culture of death does not stop at birth

Lindsay Clancy killed her three children in the basement of their Massachusetts home. Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. Clancy strangled them with exercise bands while her husband was away picking up dinner and medication, then attempted to take her own life.

A jury is now deciding whether she was criminally responsible. Her attorneys maintain that postpartum psychosis left her unable to understand or control her actions. Prosecutors argue that she knew what she was doing, planned the killings and understood they were wrong. The competing evidence about her mental state deserves careful consideration, as does whether the medical system responded adequately when she repeatedly sought help. The jury began deliberating last week.

Whatever the jury decides, three children are dead. Their names should remain at the center of the story.

Much of the public discussion has centered on Clancy’s mental state, her medications, her intentions and the quality of the care she received. Those questions belong in the courtroom and in any serious examination of maternal mental health. Yet the children often seem to recede into the background, becoming supporting figures in a tragedy understood primarily through the experience of the person who killed them.

That moral imbalance did not appear from nowhere. American culture has spent more than fifty years teaching that a mother may authorize the death of her unborn child when motherhood becomes unbearable, unwanted or incompatible with the life she believes she should have. The law, medical profession, entertainment industry and feminist movement have repeated the same message across generations: compassion for a woman in distress may require accepting the death of her child.

Clancy’s crime was not caused by abortion. The moral confusion surrounding it was cultivated by a society that has made a child’s right to live dependent on a mother’s circumstances, judgment and distress.

Abortion established a radical principle within American life. A child may be fully human, genetically distinct and physically alive while possessing no enforceable claim against the person with power over him. His survival depends upon whether she recognizes him as wanted. His death may then be described as health care, autonomy or a difficult private decision.

Birth supplies the legal boundary. It cannot repair the damage inflicted on the moral imagination.

An unborn child and an eight-month-old infant differ in development and dependence, though neither has the ability to defend himself or negotiate the terms of his care. Both rely upon adults to recognize an obligation that precedes preference. Once society teaches that maternal hardship can extinguish that obligation before birth, it should expect the language of choice, burden and compassion to influence how people reason about children after birth.

That influence can be heard in the public response to the Clancy case. Much of the sympathy has flowed toward Clancy and the suffering described by her defense. Compassion for women facing serious postpartum illness is human and necessary. It becomes morally disordered when it obscures the lives taken or treats the anguish of the person who killed them as more consequential than the children’s right to exist.

Even the idea attributed to Clancy during the trial, that her children would be safer dead, carries an echo of the culture of death. A hospital chaplain testified that Clancy said she was glad the children were safe after she killed them. Experts disagreed over whether this belief arose from psychosis, severe depression or an attempt to explain her conduct. The belief itself turns protection into destruction. It allows the person responsible for preserving life to imagine that ending it is an act of care.

America has heard that reasoning before. Children facing disability are spared lives allegedly unworthy of living. Babies expected to enter poverty are spared deprivation. Mothers facing fear, abandonment or financial strain are told that ending a pregnancy may be the responsible decision. Death is presented as relief, and the language of compassion conceals the identity of the person who pays the price.

This is the demonic progression of the culture of death. It presents killing as compassion, recasts the child as a burden and directs society’s sympathy toward the person with power rather than the innocent life that power destroyed.

A pro-family politics must recover the clarity to protect mother and child together. Women suffering from postpartum depression or psychosis need vigilant medical care, stronger families and institutions willing to intervene before a crisis becomes a catastrophe. They need husbands, relatives, churches, doctors and communities prepared to recognize danger and remain present through it. These responsibilities cannot be discharged through slogans about personal choice or by handing a suffering woman another prescription and sending her home.

Children need an equally firm commitment. Their right to live cannot fluctuate with the emotional condition, economic security or private judgment of the adults around them. Dependence creates a greater obligation to protect life. It never diminishes the value of that life.

Cora, Dawson and Callan were not extensions of their mother’s distress. They were three human beings with lives, futures and claims of their own. Any honest account of this tragedy must begin there.

America will not become pro-family until it can care for desperate mothers while refusing every argument that makes their children expendable. The boundary protecting human life must be restored in law, medicine and culture. It must begin before birth, because a society that negotiates the value of children in the womb will eventually struggle to defend it everywhere else.