Traumatic events can shatter the boundaries of acceptable discourse, forcing conversations once considered unthinkable into the open. We’re living through one of those moments now.
Viral videos show large crowds of women rallying for Lindsay Clancy, with more than 31,000 now contributing more than $1 million to support a woman who methodically researched, planned, and then murdered her three children. Social media posts have gone viral with women identifying with the killer writing the phrase: “Same, Lindsay.”
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Until now, the feminist worldview has enjoyed universal protection and celebration, going unchallenged in elite and polite society. This event could change the prior consensus. At war with physiology, feminism teaches women to recoil from seeing motherhood as part of a woman’s identity. At best, it’s an optional life accessory. At worst, it’s received with resentment — an obstacle to self-actualization.
Clancy’s defense and defenders have focused on psychosis in an insanity defense. It should be asked whether any serial killer has not suffered from some amount of mental illness? We have to face the reality that the TikTok mob of women defending her is animated by something more dangerous in the cultural air.
Feminism has long had an outright hostility to motherhood. It recoils from the notion that women should see being a mother as a core part of their identity. It’s this hostility toward biology that animates and justifies the wider empathy tantrum occurring in plain sight on social media, on GoFundMe, and in front of that courthouse.
If motherhood and children are a burden, why isn’t any mother justified, with the right amount of emotional distress, to free herself of that burden? Certainly, this is part of the intellectual justification for abortion.
Feminism is a core part of today’s liberalism. Polling now shows unhappiness among liberal women is endemic. Conservative women are, according to the 2024 American Family Survey, three times as likely to say they are completely satisfied with life. It’s not masculinity, but instead feminist ideation, that is toxic.
Healthy Christianity encourages a daily examen where we thank God as we reflect on our day’s blessings, including the blessings of family life and an acknowledgement of our sins. On the other hand, feminism encourages a rejection of the good design of family life. It is viewed either with emotions ranging from hostility to agnosticism. It encourages hostility toward men, motherhood, and family life.
The reality is that on this side of eternity, no one escapes suffering. Every life has it. Some more than others.
Married motherhood and fatherhood bring its own suffering. In a rightly ordered worldview, family life creates rewards that flow from living for others. This sacrificial love is a key reason we see that married women with children are twice as likely to report being very happy than their single, childless peers.
Yet feminism cultivates in the heart resentment toward these goods.
In this Massachusetts murder case, the defense has argued postpartum psychosis caused her killing spree. My wife has struggled twice with the debilitating effects of postpartum depression. It is a serious issue. We have also helped good friends who have struggled with it as well. I have great compassion for women experiencing it.
What animated Clancy was quite different. Clancy researched her plan on Google. She plotted to send away her husband, the only person who could stop her. And then she calmly murdered each child one by one. This sounds like the same sort of criminal illness that many on death row report.
Convicted in 2001, Eric Brown is serving a life sentence in Massachusetts today for a double murder, where the defense argued he heard delusional voices in his head telling him to murder. There are many other convicted murderers who report the same.
We know from polling that young women are radicalizing to a degree that has no historic precedent in American life. While there has been plenty of hand-wringing about young men, their ideological leanings in polling don’t appear much different than in recent decades.
Yet, more than 31,000 mostly women, many of whom are young women, have donated money, and many others are rallying in support for a murdering mother. When combined with the polling data on their leftward trajectory, this makes young women look much more like those radicalized women who marched in Petrograd during the Russian Revolution.
Good women are speaking out. Women like Libby Emmons at Human Events and Katie Miller come to mind. But men are also talking about it and are outraged by the Clancy case. In a rightly ordered time, men behave as protectors of the weak and vulnerable. And, who is weaker and more vulnerable than small children?
CLOSING ARGUMENTS CONCLUDE IN LINDSAY CLANCY TRIAL AS PROSECUTORS ARGUE MURDERS WERE ‘A CHOICE’
The horror of this case does not end with what happened inside one Massachusetts home. It extends to the crowds outside the courthouse, the money pouring in, and the thousands of women who see something of themselves in a mother who killed her children. That reaction demands more than disgust. It demands an accounting.
A culture should be judged by what it teaches people to love, what it teaches them to hold in contempt, and ultimately, what it teaches them to excuse. For generations, feminism has demanded the authority to reshape how women understand men, marriage, motherhood, sacrifice, and themselves. It can no longer demand immunity from judgment for the culture it helped create.
J.P. De Gance is the founder and president of Communio, a nonprofit organization that equips churches to promote healthy relationships, marriages, and the family. He is co-author of Endgame: The Church’s Strategic Move to Save Faith and Family in America.