Pro-Lifers' Inconsistency: Excusing Abortion While Condemning Filicide
Source: Kayla Suderman. "Clancy Case Should Make Pro-Lifers Rethink Absolving Mothers." August 25, 2026. thefederalist.com
The Gist
The author argues that pro-lifers are being hypocritical: for decades they've said women who get abortions shouldn't be punished because they're 'victims' of circumstances, but now some of those same pro-lifers are upset that people are using identical reasoning to excuse Lindsay Clancy for killing her born children. She says both cases involve someone deliberately killing their own child, and if you let one type of killer off the hook due to sympathy, you can't consistently condemn the other—the real answer, she argues, is that all intentional child-killing is sin and must be punished, regardless of the mother's circumstances.
Conclusion
The pro-life movement should reconsider its long-standing practice of exempting women from criminal culpability for abortion, because this same 'victim' framework is now being used to excuse mothers like Lindsay Clancy who kill their born children, and consistency demands that all intentional child-killing—prenatal or postnatal—be treated as culpable murder deserving punishment.
Premises
- Public sympathy for Lindsay Clancy frames her as a victim of postpartum psychosis, medication, and systemic failures rather than as a culpable murderer, with some women identifying with her ('It could be me').
- For decades, prominent pro-life leaders and organizations (National Right to Life, Priests for Life, Students for Life, SBA Pro-Life America, John Willke) have explicitly opposed criminally penalizing women who obtain abortions, framing them as 'victims' of circumstance, coercion, or the abortion industry.
- The rhetorical structure used to excuse Clancy (external factors like hormones, medication, depression, deception mitigate culpability) mirrors the rhetorical structure the pro-life movement has used to excuse women who abort.
- Christian theology holds that the root cause of violent acts like murder is sin/human wickedness (citing Jeremiah 17:9, Matthew 15:19, Exodus 20:13, 1 John 3:4), not merely external circumstances, and sin demands justice/punishment rather than excuse.
- If the law grants mothers immunity for intentionally killing prenatal children, there is no principled basis to deny the same immunity for killing born children, suggesting a logical/moral continuity between the two forms of exemption.
- Ecclesiastes 8:11 warns that failing to swiftly punish evil emboldens further wrongdoing, implying that excusing maternal filicide (prenatal or postnatal) will normalize and increase such violence.
Assumptions
- Abortion is morally and legally equivalent to the murder of a born child (a full human person from conception).
- Granting leniency or non-prosecution to women in one context (abortion) logically commits one to consistency in another context (postpartum filicide), i.e., that these are sufficiently analogous cases requiring the same legal/moral treatment.
- Sin-based explanations for human behavior are correct and sufficient, and mitigating circumstances (mental illness, coercion, medication) should not reduce criminal culpability for killing.
- Retributive justice (punishment) is the appropriate response to violations of God's moral law, and failing to punish leads to societal moral decline.
- The pro-life movement's historical stance was primarily strategic/rhetorical rather than a principled application of the same 'victim' framework used for other violent crimes.
- Women who kill their children (prenatally or postnatally) possess full rational agency and moral responsibility despite documented conditions like postpartum psychosis.