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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.
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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