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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   20647 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026

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I realize this isn’t a top quality post, so I accept the judgement of the mods, but a mistrial has been declared in the case of Lindsay Clancy. Shes the woman in Massachusetts who admitted to killing her kids, but claims she was suffering from postpartum psychosis.

The jury deliberated for seven days. Apparently, it came down to one male juror holding out against the other (nine female, two male) jurors. The belief is that he wanted to vote guilty. The jury reported to the judge that the holdout refused to follow the law regarding reasonable doubt, and the defense tried to have him removed. The judge refused. This morning, the judge declared a mistrial but gave defense one hour to get a stay from the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.

Predictably, the online discourse is off the walls. X lifts the holdout up as a hero, while Reddit believes he (we know it’s a male because the defense said so) is an MRA/red piller and needs to have his phone searched.

Personally, I think she’s guilty of premeditated, cold blooded murder. That said, I get the postpartum argument, but am horrified by the defense of her and holding her up as some kind of hero.

I saw a note on Substack claiming that Shiloh Hendrix was suffering from postpartum depression at the time of the altercation which landed her in hot water. I have no idea if this is true or not, but assuming it is, I imagine there's extremely minimal overlap between the people offering public (and, in some cases, financial) support for Clancy, and the people who think Hendrix should not have faced criminal charges for saying the gamer word.

An even more potent hypothetical, I think, is the observation that none of the women supporting Clancy would have done so if, in the throes of postpartum psychosis, she'd killed three dogs rather than three human children.

The slippery slope, my moral betters would have me believe, is a fallacy: legalising X does not inevitably lead to Y, which is like X but more extreme.

It's all well and good to think that we can draw a bright line in the sand and say that killing a fetus (up to and including a full-term viable fetus) is fine and dandy, but killing a baby outside the womb is not. I know that some high-decouplers can separate these into two completely distinct mental categories. But most people (as I'm sure you're aware, or you wouldn't be reading this) are not high-decouplers. Increased support for contraception inevitably leads to increased support for the morning-after pill inevitably leads to increased support for first-trimester abortion inevitably leads to increased support for full-term abortion – and, as the Clancy supporters demonstrate, for post-term abortion.

The Hendrix comparison is illustrative. One of the strongest surviving taboos in the Anglosphere is that white people should not say the gamer word. No excuses: not if they're singing along with a song by a black musician, not if they're a politician quoting something a black person said, not if they're an academic discussing a piece of classical music by a black composer whose title features that word, not even if they're a professor of linguistics using a word from a completely different language which sounds a bit like the gamer word. Woke people obviously feel that relaxing this taboo even a smidge would lead to an opening of the floodgates (almost like it's a... slope that is... slippery, or something). It follows that we cannot extend grace to any person who uses it, no matter how sympathetic they might be: not even a woman who may have been suffering from postpartum depression and who got into a public altercation with a nonce. This taboo is so rigidly enforced that not even the "be kind" brigade wants to extend any forbearance or forgiveness to Hendrix.

But compare with abortion. It started off with the morning-after pill, then first-trimester abortion, and before you know it, low-decouplers are correctly intuiting that, if a mother killing a fetus at nine months shouldn't be a hanging crime, why should killing a child at five years be? On what grounds can we possibly justify throwing someone in jail for doing the latter, but doing nothing to someone who does the former (perhaps even subsidising their decision at the taxpayer's expense)?

Louise Perry's "We Are Repaganising" continues to trouble me deeply.

I notice that I'm fine with either extreme here.

  • We are a society and everyone is interconnected with everyone. Killing your children proves that you are an irresponsible human disaster who violates the most sacred trust that can exist between any two humans and stands against everything that makes civilization work. Abortion and infanticide are a failure on every level and those guilty of either deserve swift and draconic punishment.
  • Children are naturally the property of their parents and how parents decide to interact with their children is nobody's business.

But everything in between strikes me as limpwristed and inconsistent.

It's all well and good to think that we can draw a bright line in the sand and say that killing a fetus (up to and including a full-term viable fetus) is fine and dandy, but killing a baby outside the womb is not. I know that some high-decouplers can separate these into two completely distinct mental categories. But most people (as I'm sure you're aware, or you wouldn't be reading this) are not high-decouplers. Increased support for contraception inevitably leads to increased support for the morning-after pill inevitably leads to increased support for first-trimester abortion inevitably leads to increased support for full-term abortion – and, as the Clancy supporters demonstrate, for post-term abortion.

Virtually no one has a problem drawing that line. The fact that Europe hasn't seen that kind of scope creep should show that these things are not inevitable the intensely liberal abortion laws in America are a function of abortion being under threat and American polarization leading to radicalization. In the countries where abortion is firmly secured with little opposition we don't see that. And most people view a fetus and a baby as different so they don't need to decouple anything

Also Lindsay Clancy isn't actually an example of people supporting infanticide her supporters aren't saying it's ok she killed her kids, they are saying she should be institutionalized or her husband did it.

I think her supporters support her out of a combination of wanting more status for motherhood (ie playing the victim) and wanting to eliminate accountability for women’s actions.

the intensely liberal abortion laws in America are a function of abortion being under threat

How can one possibly say that abortion is under threat in the US?

Also Lindsay Clancy isn't actually an example of people supporting infanticide her supporters aren't saying it's ok she killed her kids

Per the "same, Lindsay" trend, many of her supporters are expressing empathy for her by admitting that they've personally felt the urge to murder their own children.

It has begun: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/illinois-mother-charged-murder-killing-2-year-old-attempting-harm-rcna596197

Note the "nickname" given by the crazy cunt to the 2 year old...

I believe this is not the only copycat case so far.

How can one possibly say that abortion is under threat in the US?

The fact that some jurisdictions have banned it? I agree the odds of abortion being banned in California are essentially nil but pro-choice activists in America fear an abortion ban in the US in a way they don't in Europe and all that matters is that they believe it. I think the more restrictive laws in Europe show this kind of radicalism is not actually inevitable.

Per the "same, Lindsay" trend, many of her supporters are expressing empathy for her by admitting that they've personally felt the urge to murder their own children.

I think they think they are being cute and cheeky and not actually literally supporting child murder. No I agree this kind of things is totally unacceptable and shows how our society refuses to hold women accountable and especially a certain kind of woman refuses to hold someone like Lindsay accountable but notice the aren't saying "yeet your kids slay queen!" they are saying someone like Lindsay couldn't be responsible for something like this, it must by the husband, or psychosis or evil doctors it's just extreme in group bias and lack of responsibility. Next time a man kills his kids they'll bring out the pitchforks because the principle isn't super late term abortion。 It's middle class white women can never be responsible for anything bad so it must be someone else's fault.

The fact that some jurisdictions have banned it?

My understanding is that no jurisdiction in the US has completely banned abortion, and even the strictest states still carve out the customary exceptions for danger to the mother's life or health, rape, incest etc. I'm open to correction on this point, however.

The prevailing theory amongst the concerned is that those carve-outs are fake, and the police will arrest women for them anyway (or women will die in emergencies because the doctors will refuse to trust the fake carve-outs).

and the police will arrest women for them anyway

Well, I have to deal with that possibility when I take certain actions to save my life. Why should women be exempt?

(You usually only get a couple of seconds to make the decision whether you'd chance being judged by 12 or carried by 6. When you take the perspective the State does, where all life belongs to the State, self-defense is the exact equivalent to an abortion.)

The prevailing theory amongst the concerned is that those carve-outs are fake

So exactly like they can be at times if in a Blue state and the human being deleted was of their favored demographic, then.

And no. From a symmetrical viewpoint, Red's favored demographic isn't "babies". They simply prioritize the value of life that's more of an inherent threat/liability to the opposite gender. For Blue, they trade off potential increased death for men as the cost of "[non-white] bodies"; for Red, they trade off potential increased death for women as the cost of "baby bodies".

(Thinking babies are somehow sacred here will prevent you from fully understanding this- men/Red reveal this preference, women/Blue don't. If you want to be fair, you must put that moral revulsion aside; if you want to understand women/Blue, you must re-assign sacredness to their demographics instead. You don't get to change this; it's just how it works.)

Progressives have a saying that "when you're privileged, equality feels like oppression". I can't say I disagree.

"False accusations [that result in criminal conviction] are incredibly rare." would also seem like a good analogy here.

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Yes that's what I was referring to. I know states all have those carveouts.

The slippery slope, my moral betters would have me believe, is a fallacy: legalising X does not inevitably lead to Y, which is like X but more extreme.

It's all well and good to think that we can draw a bright line in the sand and say that killing a fetus (up to and including a full-term viable fetus) is fine and dandy, but killing a baby outside the womb is not. I know that some high-decouplers can separate these into two completely distinct mental categories. But most people (as I'm sure you're aware, or you wouldn't be reading this) are not high-decouplers. Increased support for contraception inevitably leads to increased support for the morning-after pill inevitably leads to increased support for first-trimester abortion inevitably leads to increased support for full-term abortion – and, as the Clancy supporters demonstrate, for post-term abortion.

This argument seems extremely silly to me. You might as well claim that the end game of people fighting over the thermostat in an office either want to go to 10000K or 1K, and that giving them a single degree will inevitably lead to a slippery slope where all life will perish.

In the real world, when someone is moving from NY to California, they almost never end up defecting to North Korea. If your model of US migration involves one pole in North Korea and another pole in France which both try to attract Americans, I'll wager that your model has little predictive value.

The reason why some people on the left took to defending Clancy is adequately explained by The Toxoplasma of Rage. In short, fighting for a cause (e.g. women) in clear-cut cases (e.g. women oppressed by the Taliban) has very little signaling value, because it is a cost-less signal to send. If you say "The Taliban should allow girls and women access to education", you will have >95% of the US political spectrum on your side. Nice to keep your friends, but totally useless to prove you are part of some in-group.

The Clancy case is great for signaling purposes. "I support women even when they murder their children" is a costly signal to send. Nobody (up to the Lizardsmen's constant) is thinking "this will make a great test case to establish that mothers are entitled to fillicide."

I mean other than all the times it’s happened (see acceptance of homosexuality, abortion, and wokeness) it doesn’t work that way. You can take almost any cultural form of degeneration and you can plot it out. In 1940, love songs featured the idea of marriage, in 1950, it was puppy love, and by 2026 “love” is jettisoned from the songs in favor of nearly pornographic descriptions of sex acts. Violence is also much more common and much more graphic and depraved than we would have seen in the mid century. If you dropped your 25 year old grandmother fresh from 1959 or 1949 she’d be shocked by how far we’d fallen culturally and morally.

You can take almost any cultural form of degeneration and you can plot it out.

Nudity in movies is almost completely gone. Basically all forms of drugs taking except pot were more accepted in the past. Heroine was legal for about 20 years 100 years ago. Calling things you don't like gay was ok in the 90s and now it isn't. Calling things you don't like was ok, then it wasn't and now it's back. Most of the world until the mid 1800 had no age of consent laws, the places that had them often set it apallingly low (like 12), in 1980 the blue lagoon was released with partial underage nudity, these days there's talk of raising the age of consent to 21 or 25, which would make the blue lagoon underage pornography because of the male lead . Slavery was almost universally legal until 200 years ago and now it isn't unless it's men getting drafted to go to war. Abortion before quickening was legal under common law until last century, then it wasn't and now it's back. Alcohol consumption was ok for most of history, then people advocated against it and now it's back. Eugenics was bad for most of history, then people advocated for it, and now it's back to being bad. Absolute monarchy was considered the good christian way to rule a country and now it isn't. Etcaetera.

If you dropped your 25 year old grandmother fresh from 1959 or 1949 she’d be shocked by how far we’d fallen culturally and morally.

She would probably also be thrilled at how much women have advanced in society.

Calling things you don't like was ok, then it wasn't and now it's back.

I think you may have accidentally a word....

She would probably also be thrilled at how much women have advanced in society.

I highly doubt it. Back then, what we have now was an "uncharitable strawman slippery slope" that conservatives would use the try and scare people away from social reforms. If you beamed a woman from back then to now, her reaction would most likely be to "oh my god, they were right", and to become a nun, for good measure.

All of those things had high status people openly advocating for them in the 60s. No one now is arguing killing your kids is ok.

Yes they are:

As Canada slips down its slippery slope, the legalization of infanticide is being discussed quite calmly within its government. In October, Louis Roy of the Quebec College of Physicians told the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying that parents should be able to arrange the deaths of babies up to one year old who are deemed to have “very grave and severe syndromes.”

Ok that's utterly horrifying.

Consider me intrigued. Killing those unfit for life to remove undue burdens on the welfare state? Yes please, that sounds like fast-forwarding through a few decades of civilizational decay and tackling the hard issues of the future head on. When there is a surfeit of life, too many useless eaters, too many parasites and too much rent-seeking by those who cannot contribute, the edifice of the social economy cannot stand. There must be culling, one way or another, or else there will be ever-more welfare recipients until civilization tears itself apart in order to keep alive those who cannot do so themselves. Mercy-killing those who cannot contribute is a solemn duty of the enlightened state.

But of course that's not what it is. It's just culture war, and killing babies is somehow a sacred cow of one side.

I'm guessing you're referring to the Gnadentod policy / Aktion T4.

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I can't entirely rule out the possibility that, a few months ago, Louis Roy posted something on X/BlueSky along the lines of "Ugh, can't believe it's 2025 and Sydney Sweeney is openly promoting eugenics on national television 🙄".

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This argument seems extremely silly to me. You might as well claim that the end game of people fighting over the thermostat in an office either want to go to 10000K or 1K, and that giving them a single degree will inevitably lead to a slippery slope where all life will perish.

Well, no. This is a terrible analogy on the face of it, but that aside, we can observe that parents murdering their children has been totally normal (and legal) in any number of human societies historically. This at least should suggest that it's very possibly going to happen again once the impetus which put a stop to such behavior (Christianity) ceases to motivate people.

Considering the non Christian societies that exist now don't allow child murder I thin we'll be alright.

The ones that got totally curbstomped by Christian societies intent on enforcing Christian values, and who desperately recast themselves to be more palatable to Christian superpowers?

Yeah, I think if that pressure goes away, so too does the change in behavior. There's some inertia, sure, but there's no such thing as obvious universal human morality that includes such oddities as "don't kill your children" or "rape is wrong" or "everyone should be treated with basic dignity."

Also, plenty of Islamic societies absolutely do allow child murder, especially in cases of e.g. honor killings. Smart governments talk a lot about putting such things behind them, but that's playing to what they perceive as Western sensibilities. You know, like when they say "Jihad just means personal internal struggle, lol" or "These aren't slaves, they're guest workers benefiting from economic opportunity!"

The ones that got totally curbstomped by Christian societies intent on enforcing Christian values, and who desperately recast themselves to be more palatable to Christian superpowers?

No I think most societies had stopped routine exposure of infants the time of colonization. And places like China never made themselves pliable Western clients and they still don't have it.

"don't kill your children" or "rape is wrong" or "everyone should be treated with basic dignity."

There are dozens of independent moral codes that have come up with these rules, you don't need Jesus to ban these. Also when you look at the old Testament God gets pretty flexible on some of these.

Also, plenty of Islamic societies absolutely do allow child murder, especially in cases of e.g. honor killings

And that's fucked up but killing a 15 year old for having premarital sex is an entirely different phenomena then infanticide' and I didn't say no place ever kills children just that I don't think we needed Christianity to end the practice given that o one does it anymore expect maybe some far out hunter gatherers.

You know, like when they say "Jihad just means personal internal struggle, lol"

This isn't just some line to feed Westerners. It's not like the Gulf Monarchs are pro-Jihad they try to get their own population to by it and work with the CIA to crush Islamists everywhere. And also while Jihad "just" meaning internal struggle is obviously overthrowing your Monarch who rules based on Shariah to implement some kind of theocratic republic or suicide bombing random "infidel" civilians are also pretty novel interpretations has history goes.

No I think most societies had stopped routine exposure of infants the time of colonization.

I'm not just talking about exposure of infants, and either way I disagree. The New World was absolutely rife with ritual child murder. Exposure was also very common in East Asia and India at time of European contact, especially for girls. Sub-Saharan Africa was ofc its own special hell. So, I'm categorically rejecting this one.

But honor killings are not just applied to teens. Check this case out.

There are dozens of independent moral codes that have come up with these rules

I don't think so; and to the degree that this might technically be true it doesn't matter unless those moral codes were influential enough to stop the practices at scale, which they clearly were not. Where they did exist, they generally applied only to the ingroup. When it comes to rape, well, a lot gets lost in cultural understanding of what that means. But the Christian insistence that the woman must consent to a marriage is probably worth thinking about. And even if, hypothetically, several of these systems could have worked, we may observe that only one actually did.

I don't think we needed Christianity to end the practice given that o one does it anymore expect maybe some far out hunter gatherers

I think we do. I think even in the West it's becoming a lot more popular without Christianity. Why would I expect non-Westerners to not do it when apparently even we can't manage that?

This isn't just some line to feed Westerners. It's not like the Gulf Monarchs are pro-Jihad they try to get their own population to by it and work with the CIA to crush Islamists everywhere.

Because they are personally dependent upon their relationship with the West, yes, obviously. Do you think that rhetoric will hold longer than the very instant it is once again advantageous for them to rile their people up to take territory from the kafir? Has it ever, historically?

Don't you find it at least interesting that feminists are willing to support women even when they murder their children, but not when they say the gamer word? "I support women, even when they use racial slurs when their blood is up" seems like it could be an equally effective costly signal, and yet it wasn't.

I'm sure you'll say something to the effect that supporting Shiloh Hendrix would mark you out as a conservative, so it's a useless signal to demonstrate that you are a feminist specifically. But if that's the case, your entire argument that they're supporting her solely "because she's a woman" collapses. No progressive feminist would be caught dead throwing her weight behind Hendrix. Very few will be caught dead throwing their weight behind JK Rowling. But quite a few absolutely will throw their weight behind a woman who has admitted to murdering her three children. The revealed preferences of this group are not "we will support women no matter what awful crimes they commit" but "we will support women unless they commit certain especially grave crimes, in which case they're on their own". The revealed preferences of this group is that they consider yelling racial slurs or criticising gender ideology less forgiveable sins than murdering one's children.

And the "same, Lindsay" trend on TikTok indicates that many of these women are supporting Clancy not "because she's a woman" but because they have personally struggled with the same urges to harm their children that she found impossible to resist. How many of these women, do you think, would admit to having felt the urge to yell racial slurs at misbehaving ethnic minorities while in the depths of their postpartum depression or psychosis?

I don't think my argument is silly, and I don't think these protesters' behaviour is explicable by a desire to show support for women no matter what they do. I think, rather, that progressive feminists have extremely strict criteria for which women they will and won't throw their weight behind. It disturbs me that a woman who murdered her three children is in the former category, and a woman who yelled a racial slur at a nonce is in the latter.

Don't you find it at least interesting that feminists are willing to support women even when they murder their children, but not when they say the gamer word? "I support women, even when they use racial slurs when their blood is up" seems like it could be an equally effective costly signal, and yet it wasn't.

I think it's intensely interesting as a phenomena but I think you are missing some of the factors in her support. The core of her supporters are suburban white women, not feminists. specifically a kind of overly online, true crime brained suburban white women. The type of people who watched Nancy Grace back in the day. This first and foremost a white women phenomena more than it is about left right politics and indeed these type of suburban white women aren't particularly left coded, and while I'd guess a majority of her supporters are some flavor of liberal, there are plenty of apolitical and right wing supporters of her as well. And a huge portion are outside the Overton window the tiktok astrology girlies are not respectable liberals

As for why not Shiloh Hendrix because women don't care about the gamerword I'd hazard more liberal men have used it then conservative suburban moms and it's not like suburban conservative moms are ok with their sons saying slurs on Xbox live either. And it's just not a salient issue for women it's in the name gamerword. True crime on the other hand is of an issue to women and like catnip or crack to some women this case is more similar to like something like Casey Anthony then a left right political issue. I've heard this described as Qanon for white women which I think covers it and this is truly a gender war thing rather then a left right political thing. Her supporters are literally entirely white women motivated by entitlement misandry and true crime brain. I do think it shows the depths of the women are wonderful fallacy in our society and I've seen a lot of otherwise party line liberal men utterly flabbergasted by women's reaction to this case, so I'm curious if this will lead to any backlash or long lasting effects.

On a somewhat unrelated note I thought Nancy Grace generally has a bas reputation among overly online, true crime brained suburban white women.

You think astrology and mainstream feminism are different people?

That's not very convincing. For one, it completely blows up your earlier framing, it's not about "defending women even if..." , it's about supporting them only when they're in the same class, and even the class issue falls flat when you compare it to the reaction to JK Rowling. She was just as popular as true crime is now, when she made her comments on the trans issue, and legions of women built their identity around Harry Potter.

That wasn't me commenting earlier. I don't think it's women issue. You won't see any black women supporting her. As for JK I think that's an entirely different line as in that's political/culture war issue in a way that this isn't. This cuts across potical lines and

You have both left wing and right women on tiktok going nuts with conspiracies' about how she was framed by her evil husband, or about how she was failed by the evil doctors or just can't be held responsible because she's crazy. And that's the main thing no matter what Lindsay can't have been responsible. There's a resistance to responsibility and misandry that runs through it. What it's not is an actual defense of child killing. If man or fat ugly black woman did this they wouldn't care one iota. It's similar to other true crime tempests like Casey Anthony or Madeline McCann, except this one shows some really ugly beliefs that have been simmering under the surface.

at a nonce

Wasn't Hendrix's target an 8 year old?

First an 8-year-old, then the boy's father, who escaped prosecution for statutory rape pretty much solely due to his ethnicity.

Cite?

Comment.

In a somewhat ironic twist, apparently the guy who recorded the viral youtube video at the center of all this, was arrested for gang raping a child in 2022, and had those charges dropped "in the interests of justice" by the same prosecutor's office that this year thought it was in the interests of justice to throw the book at somebody for saying a naughty word. What a funny world we live in.

Another source.

That's the cameraman Sharmake Omar (I'm 99% sure - ages on the stories are off by a couple years, and those are apparently popular Somali names, but photo/video looks like a match), not the father Shire Jimale, but other than that I guess "nonce" was probably going easy on the guy.

Thanks for the links; I don't recall seeing that before.

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Wasn't Clancy's?

5, 3, and 0, not 8.

Did someone here call one of them a nonce, or did you just not understand the reason behind my question?

But compare with abortion. It started off with the morning-after pill, then first-trimester abortion, and before you know it, low-decouplers are correctly intuiting that, if a mother killing a fetus at nine months shouldn't be a hanging crime, why should killing a child at five years be?

English common law allowed abortion before 'quickening' (16-20 weeks, when the fetus's movements can be felt) for centuries, following Church teaching that the fetus was not yet ensouled. So the debate has not been monotonic.

England, like several other commonwealth and European countries, has infanticide law defining a lesser charge for 'mentally disturbed' women who killed their <1 year old babies. This arose because juries were reluctant to hand out the death penalty to poor and desperate unmarried women.

https://www.counselmagazine.co.uk/articles/100-years-of-the-infanticide-act

This strikes many Americans as a grave injustice, but it doesn't seem to increase infanticide rates.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2174580/

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1556-4029.70136

Citation Needed on English common law allowing abortion for centuries (instead of just classifying it as something wrong but not yet murder), but I know that the stance of the Catholic Church is often misrepresented in these online fact checks.

Many people are surprised to learn that there was, in fact, a range of views among Catholic canonists at the time about the severity of very early abortion. On the strict end were those who held that very early abortion was, very simply, murder. On the lax end where those who held that intentional very early abortion was not quite murder. These laxists treated very early abortion as a severe crime that ought to be punished “as for murder” (canon Si aliquis), but argued that, technically, it wasn’t actually murder, and so didn’t need to punished identically to murder. In 1942, scholar John Huser described the “lax” position:

The Decretists, notably Rufinus and Bernard of Pavia, indicated that abortion of a non-formed fetus was considered quasi-homicide, that is, the penalties were similar to but not so severe as those for true homicide.

It would never even have occurred to any of these writers that some future hostile reader would attempt to interpret their words in that way as permitting very early abortion. Every one of these men taught that a single act of deliberate masturbation condemned a man to Hell unless the sin was repented.4 The very laxest view available in the 12th century was that very early abortion was a serious crime that wasn’t quite as bad as full-on murder… but it would still definitely send you to Hell!

As for England, a cursory search turns up:

Under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 (Section 58), procuring an unlawful abortion was a criminal offense punishable by up to life imprisonment.

Before then, women were punished through religious penance for procuring an abortion. The Laws of Henry I prescribed three years of religious penance for procuring an abortion before quickening.

But that's a religious penance and not a punishment from the government? We have to consider that before industrialization, the tools available to the government were execution, corporeal punishment, and imprisonment in the case of someone wealthy enough to be worth it. It has been very unpopular to execute or beat women publicly, and proving an early abortion wasn't a miscarriage in a court of law would have been difficult. A religious confession to the crime, followed by a period of required penance, was the best means to punish something that was at the least highly frowned upon at the time.

We have enough evidence to show that abortion before quickening was not considered an unalloyed good like it is today.

Also I'd be shocked if I were to grab a pre-quickening advocate from that period, drag them into the twenty-first century and then explain that starvation is essentially a thing of the past and contraception is available but society still would like to make what would be essentially 'abortions of convenience' compared to the prevailing historical situation.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC487792/

https://studentbriefs.law.gwu.edu/crcl/2024/06/24/dobbs-v-history-part-one-english-common-law/

https://lawandhistoryreview.org/article/abortion-was-a-crime-three-medievalists-respond-to-english-cases-dating-all-the-way-back-to-the-13th-century-corroborate-the-treatises-statements-that-abortio/

The word crime harbored important ambiguities as well. For medieval jurists and theologians the Latin “crimen” meant something more akin to sin. Medieval English lawyers used a different word for what we mean today by crime. They used the word “felony.” The difficulty this poses for Alito’s marshalling of the evidence is that there is no tradition, deeply rooted or otherwise, of prosecuting post-quickening abortions as felonies at common law in the medieval period. Penalties for women who terminated their pregnancies post-quickening are spelled out most clearly in medieval penitential manuals, where the offense is treated as a sin to be absolved through penance. And even here it is clear that the underlying sin is the fornication that resulted in pregnancy. Penances imposed for abortions pre-quickening were minor, as they were even for post-quickening abortions for poor women. Some manuals imposed no penance at all on poor women who aborted. More severe penances were reserved for abortions or for neonaticide motived by an effort to conceal fornication or adultery.

I’m not sure your history is accurate. The quickening was an evidentiary standard.

One of the strongest surviving taboos in the Anglosphere is that white people should not say the gamer word.

You can say it if you are a white anti-ice protestor and the ICE agent is ethnic.

Be engaged in the right causes and you get a pass.

You are assuming that society is only okay with abortions because contraception is widespread, and that these women are becoming okay with killing babies because they see abortion as good and necessary. I don't think these things are actually connected. They merely look similar, allowing for post-hoc rationalizing into a slippery slope that never existed.

In reality, mothers were killing their babies long before medical abortions were a thing, and in societies where such were not available. In fact, this is one of the arguments in favor of making abortions legal. Desperate women are doing it anyway, at great risk to themselves. Standardization can only happen when it is legal, and makes it much safer while also allowing for better informed decision making, as the doctor in charge can explain the likely ramifications of the procedure.

So there isn't really a causal line from abortions to baby killings. Neither is there a real connection between contraception and abortions. Women have been aborting their kids long before modern condoms became available, and obviously way before more modern methods like the pill.

Women have also been leaving their infants in the forest to die of exposure for millennia. It is somewhat natural human behavior to kill your young kids before they become useful, whether by leaving a toddler in the woods or by a herbal abortificant.

We thought we were better than all that. First, because we were Christian Europe and Christians would rather suffer nobly than disobey God. Then, as we Enlightened ourselves and Industrialized, we said, "Look at our prosperity! No one starves here." So we walled off a section of natural human behavior - thou shall not kill your kid. Not in the the park, not in the dark, not in the womb, no kids in the tomb. We will not kill them here or there, we will not kill them anywhere!

...But, sometimes even with all this prosperity, there's still times when it's inconvenient to have a child. So maybe we can kill them before they look cute. Ok, that's settled, we can kill them before we get the chance to look at them and get attached. But that's it! Once they're out of the womb obviously we couldn't kill them. They have your eyes and their mother's chin. That seems like a pretty good deliminator, right?

Except a lot of the time, it's still inconvenient to have a child that hasn't reached a certain level of self sufficiency. Can you really blame a woman for being overwhelmed and taking the next obvious step? What crime had she done to deserve the punishment of small children thrust upon her? "It is true that I wished to escape, and I still wish to; is that not lawful for all prisoners?"

So here we are. Do we continue our slide back to "natural human behavior?" Or do we reinforce the wall?

If you want to get rid of inconvenient children you can give them up for adoption, our society has a whole system for that. Dealing with it through official channels might, I guess, be a bit of a hassle with the paperwork and everything, and put strain on one's marriage if the father isn't so hot on the idea, but… surely it can't be more of a hassle than the grueling, humiliating, equally paperwork-heavy process of convincing a judge that you're innocent of murder for reason of insanity; to say nothing of the husband issue. I just don't buy that our society incentivizes women to murder their children for convenience's sake.

And that's the thing about Clancy, really. I simply do not buy that this was a case of a woman trying to get rid of her children because they were inconvenient. No matter how they might hate being a parent, I don't see how a lucid person could possibly do what she did without realizing that they would inevitably be ruining their own life in the process. Either her ability to think through the consequences of her actions was completely disrupted, or it was an incredibly twisted attempt at suicide-by-proxy - either way, these are the actions of someone completely off their rocker, and the subsequent suicide attempt only strengthens that impression. I just can't make the killings make any kind of sense as the actions of a clear-headed schemer who thought she should be allowed to bump off her children because they were clogging up her schedule, and had a cold-blooded plan for getting away with it.

I think you're setting up a false dichotomy, where either a) Clancy was completely off her rocker, and murdered her children in a psychotic fugue state; or b) Clancy coldly, consciously decided to murder her children, expecting to get away with it.

But I think there's a much more plausible third explanation: Lindsay decided to kill herself, but couldn't stomach the idea of a stepmother raising her children in her absence. So she decided "if I can't have you, no one can", and offed them before trying to take her own life. This kind of behaviour is so common there's a Wikipedia page about it*: we just do a double-take with Lindsay because, like all kinds of violent crime, it's far more common for the perpetrator to be a man than a woman. Lindsay probably reasoned that the chances of her successfully killing Patrick were pretty slim, so she went for the next-best option.

*Even a cursory inspection reminds me of how ideologically captured Wikipedia is:

  • 2026 Tumbler Ridge shooting, February 10, 2026, Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, Canada. Jesse Van Rootselaar killed her mother and step-brother before carrying out an attack at a school, killing seven people, including herself.

NOT. OUR. CRIMES.

Lindsey decided to kill herself...by supericially knicking her skin with a knife, then sliding out a two story window. No, that doesn't pass the smell test. What, the poor woman was just too petered out by the effort in strangling her kids to properly slit her wrists, or hang herself? No, that's not "plausible;" she tried to stage a suicide attempt, but fucked it up and ended up paralyzed (she probably figured a broken leg from the fall, at most.)

We've seen this story before. Lindsey was a narcissist, who thought she wanted to be a homemaker, but it turns out that having a loving and supporting family just isn't enough to combat a culture that invests untold billions into telling women that they are the main character. That's why her kids had to die, not some absurd fantasy of "not leaving the kids to be raised by a substandard mother," but because her ego would never forgive her kids being evidence of her failure.

Isn't she paralysed from the waist down?

I think you're setting up a false dichotomy, where either a) Clancy was completely off her rocker, and murdered her children in a psychotic fugue state; or b) Clancy coldly, consciously decided to murder her children, expecting to get away with it.

It's not so much that I view these as a hard binary, as that only b] seems like it could possibly have anything to do with an endemic societal issue of devaluing babies' lives because of abortion; so if we rule b] out, that whole aspect of the discourse is left looking like something of a red herring. I didn't mean to imply that if b] was ruled out then Clancy was definitely just an innocent victim of circumstances with no control over her actions whatsoever.

Indeed, I myself further disambiguated the "off her rocker" prong between the momentary psychotic fugue, and the more premeditated option of a convoluted suicide. (I do think that wanting to kill yourself, especially with an accompanying compulsion to kill your own children for the kind of neurotic reasons you describe, constitutes a form of insanity. This isn't to say that it should meet the bar of "legal insanity" qua grounds for acquittal, but legal insanity is a very narrow subset of what we otherwise mean by insanity in conversation, and deliberate self-destruction complete with the annihilation of what one holds most dear out of runaway jealously seems as textbook an example of "crazy" as anything else.)

I agree that anyone who sets out to kill their children and then themselves is "crazy" in the colloquial sense. No one, not even the prosecution, disputes that Lindsay suffered from mental illness. But the evidentiary standard required to establish that a person was insane at the time they committed a crime is much stricter than that required to establish that they suffered from a mental illness. Everyone who was insane at the time they committed a crime has a mental illness, but not everyone who has a mental illness is insane.

the evidentiary standard required to establish that a person was insane at the time they committed a crime is much stricter than that required to establish that they suffered from a mental illness (…)

I don't think it'd be helpful to restrict common usage of "insane" to the legal category. I don't think calling someone like Clancy insane is simply colloquial/hyperbolic, they simply seem like distinct meanings of the word, with the narrow legal definition being a technical term-of-art, much as "incompetent" and "legally incompetent" are wholly different things, and mathematicians use "irrational" or "imaginary" in ways that are wholly their own. I think there is a legitimate question of whether Clancy was "insane" that is distinct both from whether she was merely "mentally ill" (someone with clinical depression is not necessarily "insane"), and whether she passed the bar of legally insane.

Of course, at this point we're basically on the same page on the facts, we're just litigating semantics.

More comments

Part of the motivation for infanticide is the sense that it would be awful for the kid to be raised by someone else. The kid being raised by a stranger, losing control of the child, appears to be more awful than ending the child's life.

There is a similar motivation for abortion in most cases. This is why many women abort instead of putting the child up for adoption. Many pro-life organizations have realized this which is why they have moved on from promoting adoption to promoting support for young mothers and assistance with school and housing.

If you've been a pregnant woman maybe you understand. Maybe if you are a father you understand? I've been pregnant before at times where it felt impossible to have another kid. The temptation is not to then put the new kid up for adoption. That would be awful, having a kid somewhere out there and no idea what's going on. That little piece of your heart walking around out there without you to protect it.

The temptation is to kill the kid, to make the child not exist, to remove that bond entirely. It is highly irrational, but how many families put 2nd or 3rd siblings up for adoption vs abort them?

60% of women seeking abortions already have one child. One-third of mothers seeking an abortion have two or more children

Women with two or more children are generally not opposed to pregnancy from a body horror aspect. Some may have health issues, but the majority give the reasoning that their family is already the right size, they can't afford another kid, and other reasons that would equally be an excuse to go to an adoption agency and voluntarily relinquish the kid in exchange for the adoptive parents covering the cost of health care (which they will happily do because infants are hard and expensive to adopt.)

Meanwhile, voluntary relinquishment of infants is low. Only 1% of babies born to never-married women were relinquished by their mothers for adoption within the first month of the babies’ lives. The number is much smaller for married women.

@Bombadil commented that "The fact that you can hold the baby in your arms changes the calculus so drastically." But consider that this is actually a separation to the mother. The birth of a baby is not the revelation of the baby to the mother but the beginning of a loss of intimacy. The baby is ever present to the mother while in the womb, realer than real, and yet there are still places where women can kill their kids up until the last day of pregnancy. We pretend that abortion after quickening exists solely for health reasons but the majority of third term abortions are for convenience. "The most common reasons for delay were that it took a long time to make arrangements (59%), to decide (39%) and to find out about the pregnancy (36%)."

I for one am happy my biological mother did not kill me.

Your bio-mother was a good person.

I don't see how a lucid person could possibly do what she did without realizing that they would inevitably be ruining their own life in the process. Either her ability to think through the consequences of her actions was completely disrupted, or it was an incredibly twisted attempt at suicide-by-proxy - either way, these are the actions of someone completely off their rocker, and the subsequent suicide attempt only strengthens that impression.

Note it's not uncommon for suicidal people to intentionally ruin their life in order to ensure they have no choice but to fully commit to the suicide.

I just don't buy that our society incentivizes women to murder their children for convenience's sake.

So why do we have abortion laws, then? The women tell me it's literally a female-privilege/power thing- that the baby creates a liability, and that it's OK to kill liabilities.

Are they incorrect? Obviously they must be.

If they are correct, then "I am allowed to abort my children whenever I want, including post-natally" is trivially a natural consequence of the same abortion argument.

Note that I do completely agree that this case isn't motivated by convenience (because she had other ways to do that). It's basically just a bog-standard family annihilator case, with the associated motivations- convenience may commonly be claimed (or shorthand) for the motive in those cases, but I doubt that's anywhere near the whole story.

To the point that I actually don't think there's anything mentally wrong with the people that do this (well, other than "being insufficiently able to resist a very specific trapped prior", which is what some types of mass shooters do as well, right down to the suicide [by self or cop]).
But that's not insanity. You had the choice to resist doing that and you didn't; that's why it needs to be prosecuted.

Yet the women defending her are doing so because they perceive, correctly, that their convenience/privilege would be called into question should she be found guilty. That's the difference.

They can't just say "bad woman was bad, #notAllWomen", for the same reason behind why every mass shooting turns into a gun control male privilege debate (and note that these are the women who absolutely will #allMen when that happens).

But that's not insanity. You had the choice to resist doing that and you didn't; that's why it needs to be prosecuted.

Oh, I wasn't saying it necessarily met the bar for legal insanity - though I do think it meets the bar for vernacular, common-sense "insanity", as do all mass shooters. Just that these are not the actions of someone who coldly thought of getting rid of her children as something that was, or should be, as casual as getting an early-term abortion or a nose job; that these are not the actions of someone who thought she was going to, in any meaningful sense, get away with it. Either she didn't want to get away with it, or she wasn't thinking of the future at all. It sounds like you agree with me on that much.

So why do we have abortion laws, then? The women tell me it's literally a female-privilege/power thing- that the baby creates a liability, and that it's OK to kill liabilities. (…) If they are correct, then "I am allowed to abort my children whenever I want, including post-natally" is trivially a natural consequence of the same abortion argument.

Well, I think that's a somewhat unfair gloss of what "the women" are saying, though I'm sure some say it. But even taking this argument at face value I don't think it's a natural consequence at all. "It's okay to kill liabilities" might be rephrased as "it's okay to kill liabilities if it's the only way to get rid of them". There are, as covered, other, better ways to get rid of living children, while there's typically no way to get rid of a fetus without killing it. If science advances to the point that transplanting a fetus at any stage of development into an artificial womb becomes easy and cheap, I don't think it will be too hard to get people to outlaw old-school, lethal abortions.

"It's okay to kill liabilities" might be rephrased as "it's okay to kill liabilities if it's the only way to get rid of them".

No, it can't; the other option is "have the baby, put it up for adoption right then".

The point is that being forced to do that is, on its face, a threat to female power. It doesn't matter what it is; it's getting sacrificed for more power for them (usually couched as "never vulnerable to the Patriarchy", but that's just a soundbite).

So it's opposed by the bloc of women who want power as an end unto itself. Those looking for it as means are more even-handed, but they're not talking about this, now are they?

I think the almost certainly true story was that Clancy was having a really hard time, had a lot of intrusive thoughts, and started viewing this as the only way out.

While that may not be sane, I don’t think it means she lacked the ability to understand her actions were illegal or lacked the ability to not comply with her intrusive thoughts. Indeed, she previously resisted these intrusive thoughts making it clear she could resist; she just didn’t one time when the feelings were quite palpable.

So she is criminally guilty in my mind.

make any kind of sense as the actions of a clear-headed schemer

she wanted to hurt her husband as badly as she possibly could. She would not be the first woman to arrive at this solution.

That's rather a different matter from "casually getting rid of inconvenient babies as a slippery slope from the normalization of abortion", though. In fact, if this is the motive, then it works precisely because infanticide is still a massive taboo, and thus constitutes the nuclear option. If abortion had weakened the taboo against infanticide too badly then the Medea option would be losing some of its monstrous appeal.

Obviously you can't allow this kind of logics. But I think there is a very clear difference between allowing abortions before and after birth. The fact that you can hold the baby in your arms changes the calculus so drastically, that I don't believe people will see it as similar at all. It is less a slippery slope and more a conscious leap into the abyss.

Then build the wall Western man.

I'm aware of all of this, and it was the reason I linked the Louise Perry article at the bottom. Infanticide was the norm prior to Christianity. Legal abortion was sold to Western societies with the promise that it would not lead to a renewed normalisation of infanticide. In retrospect, that promise seems to have been an empty one.

But is it really renewed if occurrences did not increase? You claim a slippery slope, but I fail to see one. Have abortions increased over time? It doesn't seem like it is the case. While there was an increase in abortions after legalization, the amount has since fallen over time. Have cases of infanticide increased since the legalization of abortion? I couldn't find exact statistics on this, but scientific consensus seems to be that it is correlated with mental illness and lack of support, and still opposed in most countries including the US. So in this case, I think blaming the atomization of society makes more sense.

The Clancy supporters are problematic to say the least, but it is not at all clear to me how their actions are downstream of abortion and contraception access.

The article you cite yourself cite claims that abortions per capita increased by 0.7 points between 2016 and 2020. (Which, incidentally, puts the lie to the hysterical comparisons of the USA under Trump to The Handmaid's Tale).

It's also not a like-for-like comparison, as fertility rates have plummeted since Roe v. Wade: can't get an abortion if you never got pregnant in the first place. What you'd really want to do is to compare the ratio of live births to abortions – or, in other words, what percentage of pregnancies end in abortion vs. end in delivery vs. end in miscarriage. I'll do an effortpost on this next week.

Have cases of infanticide increased since the legalization of abortion?

Again confounded by falling fertility rates, but quote Perry:

As Canada slips down its slippery slope, the legalization of infanticide is being discussed quite calmly within its government. In October, Louis Roy of the Quebec College of Physicians told the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying that parents should be able to arrange the deaths of babies up to one year old who are deemed to have “very grave and severe syndromes.”

If you want to say this is a policy you support, fair enough, but don't tell me it isn't happening.

I'm not even necessarily arguing that abortion and infanticide are becoming more common over time, but rather that the latter is becoming, for lack of a better word, "destigmatised". By way of analogy, no one disputes that homosexuality has become vastly more socially acceptable over the past few decades in Western society, even if the proportion of the population who is gay or lesbian has remained fairly constant.

0.7 points after being stagnant for decades is hardly proof of a trend.

And when talking about canada, MAID is an entirely different beast from abortions. Assisted suicide leading to pressure to kill difficult family members is an entirely different mechanism from abortions leading to filicide.

It's not like the two trends are wholly independent of one another, and I don't know why that would be the null hypothesis.

The main argument for abortion is my body my choice. While that has the obvious problem that there is another body upon whom the mother is exercising her will upon, it still has some purchase.

But it has no purchase when the kids are outside the uterus.

Of course, the stated reasons for why abortions might be chosen still have purchase. Maybe your point is that my body my choice doesn’t really reflect the core reason behind the abortion supporters. But my guess is without the my body my choice argument few are willing to bite the bullet.

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