Clancy’s Supporters Care More About Circumstances Than Kids

In response to the ongoing trial of Lindsay Clancy, the woman who killed her three children in 2023, it seems women across the country are trying to quiet their consciences by swapping out pink pussy hats for pink T-shirts. These sympathizers have also raised more than $1 million for Clancy’s supportive parents. That stunning sum is akin to awarding a Golden Globe to an actress who publicly credits killing her offspring with advancing her career.

Was Clancy pro-abortion? Maybe she was. Maybe she wasn’t. Either way, the more revealing question isn’t what Clancy believed about abortion; it’s what the women rallying around her believe about when it’s morally acceptable to take innocent life. Thus, scarier than the woman in the courtroom, sitting in a wheelchair and staring blankly into space, are the hordes of women who may be finding solace and justification for the intentional ending of innocent human life somewhere else in the life cycle.

Is invoking Clancy’s mental illness to mitigate responsibility for her actions fundamentally different from invoking “health care” to justify abortion because a woman believes giving birth would cause her undue stress or derail her professional life? Abortion supporters can cite “reproductive freedom” all they want. That’s how it starts. The methodical murder of more than 65 million unborn human beings since Roe v. Wade is nothing more than permissible slaughter. But more important than which euphemisms we use for abortion and filicide is the message being sent to women who may come to believe that their overwhelming circumstances justify disposing of the unborn.

Under this moral framework, the prohibition is no longer simply, “It is wrong to intentionally end an innocent human life.” It has become, “It is wrong — unless circumstances make it permissible.” Even research on homicidal violence has identified this moral threshold: Many people condemn homicidal violence in principle, while identifying circumstances where they find it permissible. This concept applies to the Clancy case, where her female supporters appear to argue that even the irreversible decision to strangle three children is defensible based on circumstances.

For those who wonder, “How could the Nazis have killed 6 million Jews?” the answer becomes clearer when we see women rallying around a person who, one after another, wrapped colorful resistance bands around three children’s throats, applied sustained pressure, compressed the structures in their necks until they died, and then moved on to the next child.

Regardless of the verdict, the Clancy case is tragic. According to the defense presented on Clancy’s behalf, she committed the inconceivable while in the grip of a deeply disordered mind. But even there, another “who decides?” emerges: Who determines when a disordered mind is sufficiently disordered to excuse criminal responsibility?

This tragedy may be unique, but the permission it helps establish elsewhere is unlikely to be narrow. This is especially true as the West becomes increasingly inclined to exploit heartbreak, using so-called “empathy” for exceptional circumstances to excuse the unthinkable elsewhere. When sympathy for the person who commits evil eclipses compassion for the vulnerable victim, compassion becomes morally inverted.

Whatever conclusion the jury reaches about Clancy’s psychiatric condition and criminal responsibility, the rationalization of methodically killing three helpless children represents a profound disordering of moral judgment. That is precisely why LeRoy Carhart, Kermit Gosnell, and the dehumanizing Third Reich are relevant here. Their circumstances and methods were different, yet the question remains the same: What happens when circumstances become the rationale for defending the unthinkable?

The danger of that slippery slope is that atrocities such as murder do not require all of society to kill. They require individual perpetrators, certainly. But they can also be enabled by ordinary people who accept, rationalize, defend, or grow indifferent to the circumstances that dehumanize and endanger certain lives.

Case in point: the formal women’s wing of the Nazi Party, the National Socialist Women’s League. Another example is the “Luigi Girls” who have rallied around Luigi Mangione, the man who admitted to shooting and killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024. For some of Mangione’s supporters, hatred of corporate America and the health insurance industry is enough to turn a cold-blooded killer into a folk hero.

Different women, perhaps. Different victims, for sure. Certainly different circumstances. But there is that “unless” again. Murder is wrong — unless the victim is someone or something you despise. Murdering your children is wrong — unless mental illness sufficiently mitigates responsibility. Murdering the unborn is wrong — unless a woman believes her circumstances justify it.

The sad state of affairs in our world is that, like Clancy’s three children, the vulnerable, both inside and outside the womb, have no voice in deciding whether the circumstances invoked to justify ending their lives are sufficient.

Circumstances change. The people deciding change. Justifications multiply. How long before the same reasoning is applied to people whose existence is deemed psychologically distressing to others? What happens if the powers that be decide that their political enemies, the elderly, the infirm, or some other disfavored group cause society psychological distress — and therefore their elimination becomes defensible?

Who on the ever-expanding list of disposable humans is next?

Jeannie DeAngelis is a political writer and commentator whose work has appeared in American Thinker, Breitbart, PJ Media, The Daily Caller, The Western Journal, Live Action, and other conservative publications. Her work has appeared in the Congressional Record and has been cited in academic literature. She writes at Jeannieology and publishes at Jeannieology on Substack. She is also the author of the forthcoming “The Oxalate Paradox.”