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