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Notes -
The subjective experience of infanticide
I am not American, but I couldn't help but hear about the Lindsay Clancy trial and the subsequent controversy about the jurors.
What I personally found interesting was not necessarily the case itself; as others have pointed out, LC is not a particularly novel case and women getting kid gloves treatment for infanticide is nothing new and literally enshrined in the law of several Anglosphere countries; but rather the reactions of different parties and of the jurors.
Violence against children has, understandably, a massive cultural taboo attached to it. It's de facto banned in entertainment unless portrayed as tragic and child killers are said to get particularly bad treatment in prisons. In the ubiquitous cultural environment of society, one is implicitly taught that it is a moral abhorrence of the highest order to harm or even kill a child. At least that was my experience.
So I think for many it is shocking to see that both the legal system and a decently large group of women seem to be able to excuse this. I think what many people, particularly men are experiencing is a state of misalignment, where a system that is built to enact, at least in principle, justice seems to be fine with something that we all thought to understand as a moral abhorrence of the highest order.
I personally thought it was insightful to think about both the difference in moral values of those that would excuse child killing women and what their subjective experience of violence would be.
I believe for the now known to be black hold-out juror, violence is an immediate and known quantity. When hearing about the killings, he envisioned what it would take to brutally murder 3 children, how much force it would take, the anger one would feel. Hence the reenactment with the water bottle. The world of that juror is probably a physical one and as a male one is quite well acquainted to violence, even if in a minor form. So the heinousness and violence of the act takes on an immediate form. Also as a man societal rules seem unbending and strict; one does not get away with murder generally, though there are notable restrictions here too.
For the female juror and LC supporters, the world seems to take shape more in a form of social relations, of saying the right thing, of empathising and to be less charitable, of "luxury beliefs". The concept of a sociopathic or evil woman does not exist; society or her spouse must have done her wrong. The act of violence is far removed from subjective experience, at least physical violence. Indeed, the case is a way to advocate for the never-achieved and never-achievable emancipation of women. The law need not be unbending and strict, as we need to take the rights of the victim into account. The children are not perceived to be people deprived brutally of their right to life, but have been likened to "vases" being smashed during a tantrum.
I think what makes this such an incendiary case is that inferential gap between the two camps; for one, life is lived in the physical realm and the violence takes the forefront; for the other, life is lived in the realm of social relations and violence is not thought of. I personally find it repugnant that a legal system would find it hard to convince a person like LC, but apparently a decent chunk of the American people support her and child-killing is not such a taboo after all. Or maybe we have finally killed god enough that the sanctity of human life is being thrown to the wolves.
This is a possibility that has been on my mind a great deal of late.
I had considered posting something about the drama surrounding the Lindsey Clancy trial, but waved off as I didn't really have anything new or particular to say that wouldn't get me modded for "waging the culture war".
Yeah, I think the first time it's been on my mind was when surrogacy came up, by now it feels pretty clear that this is where we're at.
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This seems like a case of an accidental alliance among different factions who often don't even realize that they're different factions except when things like abortion come up.
The pro-child, pro-life side people think that life is valuable and worth protecting for its own sake. Children are especially worth protecting because they are vulnerable. A child dying is bad because that child loses their ability to be alive in the future and do things and live a life. The terminal utility being lost from murder was the child's utility.
The pro-choice, pro adult-human-female, feminist, female-supremecist etc side thinks that women are valuable. Every child has a mother, most mothers love their children and experience deep suffering and loss, therefore killing a child usually causes lots of harm to a woman. Killing someone else's child is bad because it causes a woman to suffer. The terminal utility being lost is from women (because adult women are what they care about)
So the taboo "killing children is bad" is generally supported by both sides and the taboo is upheld for completely different reasons. When some serial killer or rapist goes around harming children they both rise up and say "this is bad". They both care, because they both perceive harm being done to someone they care about. But one faction's care is conditional on that child having a mother who loves them and is harmed, therefore when that no longer applies they flip. From the perspective of a pro-life person, this seems like a complete 180 that came out of nowhere, but the feminist is being consistent according to her own logic and sees attempts to condemn child-killing mothers as the 180 flip that came out of nowhere. You used to be on her side protecting mothers, but now suddenly you're trying to suppress women's rights.
The taboo seems so strong because both sides have very strong feelings, but the edge cases are different and so when it frays it frays hard.
I don't think this is primarily a pro-choice/pro-life story at all. One of the kids she killed was five years old; even an extreme pro-choicer like me (on the record here before saying that I would not really personally detest parents who postnatally aborted a one-month-old) thinks this is unambiguously murder of a human being and should be treated as such. (Also, the usual kind of failure of theory of mind between tribes. No, we really do not believe fetuses are human. Being pro-abortion is really not particularly about women; I had my share of irresponsible unprotected sex back in the days, and felt very reassured by the existence of legal and easily accessed abortion.)
Instead, this is obviously just the usual case of the forces of tribalism having randomly coalesced around some nearly random figure, with the significance of the case for each tribe mostly having become how much significance it has for the other. Whether Clancy is convicted or not would primarily have the effect that it would be a visible public defeat for all the people who staked significant attention and political capital on the opposite outcome. If she is acquitted, it would bias expectations in future conflicts towards "women can get away with anything"; if she is convicted, it would bias expectations towards "all the efforts of women activists can't get one woman acquitted".
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I really don't think this is a correct model of what they are thinking. In fact liberals/feminists usually attempt to reduce the amount of authority parents have over their children and a common liberal critique of conservatives is that conservatives only care about children as an extension of their parents and not as autonomous human beings. Pro choice people and liberals also believe they value life for it's own sake and that conservatives don't. They really believe that a fetus is not a baby and so don't see it as de-valuing life.
I also think you underestimate how many conservative or right coded women are pro* Lindsay Clancy.
*it's important to remember that the pro side still want her committed to a mental hospital.
To be clear, this particular split I'm talking about is skew to the typical left-right divide, though I do think it correlates with it. I think there are more of the female-supremecists on the left than there are on the right, but there are some on both, and this illusionary alliance of pro-children allows both factions to exist together on the left or on the right without even realizing they disagree on fundamental issues.
That is, there are "pro-children" people who are for abortion who think fetuses aren't children and therefore don't count, while the pro-female people are for abortion because they think women should be allowed to kill children, and both of them are pro abortion and make fun of the right together.
I admit I don't have a very good understanding of conservative women who are pro* Lindsay Clancy. My best guess is that they combine a strong notion of property rights and familial autonomy combined with a view that children are property, or something like that. But even then, you'd think the father would get a say...
Some of them do, some of them don't. There are an awful lot of tiktokers who insist that the husband killed the kids and should go to jail while Lindsay Clancy should be completely free. I suppose on some sense this is a different faction than the ones who think it's literally okay to kill kids, but it's all tangled together among people who want her to be free first and foremost because she's a woman and are just looking for excuses.
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Yeah, part of me wants to see this as a caricature of feminist thought, but I am reminded of Hillary Clinton's famous claim which was something along the lines of women being the primary victims of war because they lose the men in their lives. It seems that there really is this attitude out there that men have no value except insofar as they offer value to women.
The quote:
All she had to do was drop "the primary" and, motivated nitpicking aside, it would have been uncontroversial and at a minimum defensible. As a speech (presumably aimed at women) she could have used emphasis to convey that her focus was on women without explicitly disregarding men. Incredible lack of judgement.
True, but I think she’s an actual, honest-to-God gynocentric feminist, and it never occurred to her that that statement might be controversial. She’s like a pro-lifer who starts off her arguments by claiming we are all made in the image of God. Neither one really thinks about how people who don’t share her foundational beliefs might react.
Perhaps, but she's a politician first and her political instincts should be sharper than those of a simple ideologue. It's the kind of clunker that an intelligent speaker should catch and correct themselves even as they're saying it out loud. A little alarm bell should be going off telling her "I don't think that's what I want to be heard saying". It's 10 years later and we're still criticising her for how ignorant and dismissive it comes across as.
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Or if she had said "the primary victims of the aftermath of war" which seems to be what she is trying to say in the following sentences.
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I like your thesis but I would like to quibble with something else.
Maybe I live under a rock, but I've only seen TheMotte and X (because that's where I hang out) claim women are excusing this. Does excusing mean they buy the postpartum psychosis story? Is this that widespread? Where? I worry we're reacting to especially crazy online women and fairly normal women are like "LC be guilty".
(I do think MA law is peculiar enough that if you apply it strictly enough Clancy had a strong case, and that's probably more MA's fault than women in the jury, but I don't expect most supporters to argue these points)
If you look at the poll below, more women would convict Clancy than exonerate her, and of those would would exonerate her not all are necessarily just using arguments as soldiers to get a sister off.
The above being said, I suspect there is a big gap cohort wise. Given republicans support her being guilty more than democrats, I suspect the numbers for democratic women are more pro-Clancy. Similarly, I bet older women due to being more conservative probably are also more anti-Clancy than younger women.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you add everything up, the younger, and especially single, PMC women who make up so much of the filter bubbles of the people here may be very pro-Clancy and give people the false impression that “women support Clancy”.
Interestingly, I saw a lot of suggestions from the right (clearly influenced by the juror interviews) that the main pro-Clancy constituency is older leftist women. If true, I can think of a lot of reasons this might be so: more time since they've been children themselves, sour grapes about not having had children, in the generation most influenced by Ehrlichian antinatalism, uh, "witch archetype"...
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Yeah I think the Motte is missing a bit on this most of Lindsay's supporters want her to be committed to a mental hospital. On the face of it's not that big a deal, the steelman would be this is a woman on a huge cocktail of psychiatric drugs, who had just been committed to a mental hospital and because she was extremely mentally ill killed her kids. I mean on the face of it strangling your kids with exercise bands is not terribly sane. Now I don't think she was legally not guilty by reason of insanity but I don't think it's crazy to think she was. I do think it's crazy to form a "fandom" and donate to her defense.
Also the real crazy women are saying the husband did it which is surprisingly wide spread. I feel like this has been ignored on the Motte because it doesn't fit the narrative of women excusing child murder and rather gets to the heart of the issue which is white feminist misandry and entitlement, with huge amounts of ingroup favoritism and women are wonderful dolloped on top.
It almost seems like it's their...motte and bailey.
I think the real bailey there is that women feel like men dismiss their inner experiences too readily, be it their feelings, physical pain, mental health... And that what Lindsay did is the loud scream of despair that cannot be ignored that they wish they could do (not the deadly result, in most cases, but doing SOMETHING that forces men to take notice of their inner experiences). And it pisses them off that men are trying to "sweep it under the carpet" as just the criminal acts that criminals do.
Uh, welcome to the human experience?? Claiming it's more common for women to have their inner experience ignored and dismissed, than it is for men, is an absolutely deluded stance from these people.
It's particularly egregious to make Clancy a figurehead for this fight, when she was so well resourced.
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She garners enough sympathy to have had 1 million USD raised, to be featured by Oprah Winfrey and for news broadcasters to have tried to character assassinate the holdout juror. Media coverage has also been broadly sympathetic.
That still could be a relative minority of women overall, but it does seem to express a tendency. Sex differences being distributional rather than discrete is also something to keep on mind I suppose.
Indeed, this poll puts the men-women delta at 10%: https://yougov.com/en-us/daily-results/20260908-75734-4
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For one, I found the interviews with the female jurors unsettling. Presumably, they are not exceptionally selected. I agree we all should discount crazy online opinions we hear.
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Another aspect may be the subjective experience of agency. Physical action is fundamentally agentic, so if the black male juror has experience with violence he would have a visceral sense that LC was taking action in her own hands. On the other hand, women are more likely to feel non-agentic, controlled by external factors - and not just women, but anyone inculcated with a postmodern paradigm that emphasizes how society shapes and controls everything about you. Non-agentic people are more likely to empathize with the idea of an uncontrollable psychotic break, because they already don't feel in control of their own lives.
Ironically, this is not something that just happens to them, either. To believe in ones non-agency and to selectively claim that "society" does all the harm that's happened in your life, is to establish in ones mind, freedom from responsibility. Freedom from consequences and accountability. It may have downsides, but it's got serious upside, too...
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