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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.
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:
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?
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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.
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.
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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?
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.
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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.
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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 controlmale privilege debate (and note that these are the women who absolutely will #allMen when that happens).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.
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.
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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Again confounded by falling fertility rates, but quote Perry:
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.
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