Nearly everyone in the Lindsay Clancy case has an advocate.
Clancy has defense lawyers arguing that postpartum psychosis left her without criminal responsibility. Prosecutors speak for the Commonwealth. Mental health organizations warn that the case could deepen the stigma surrounding postpartum illness. Commentators defend the holdout juror, whose vote for conviction produced a mistrial. Others defend the 11 jurors who reportedly favored finding Clancy not criminally responsible.
Caught beneath all this advocacy are three dead children: Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months old.
They cannot tell us what happened in their final minutes. They cannot object when their deaths become supporting material in a debate about mental illness, motherhood or the criminal justice system. They cannot hire lawyers, organize demonstrations or give television interviews.
Their absence from the public argument is painfully familiar. The people whose lives hang in the balance often have the least influence over the decision.
This pattern begins before birth. American law treats the legal protection afforded to an unborn child differently from state to state. A child’s prospects may turn on geography, gestational age, a doctor’s judgment or an adult’s decision. The child has no vote and no opportunity to ask for mercy.
California law illustrates the contradiction. The state protects the ability to euthanize the unborn before fetal viability and permits it after viability when necessary to protect the life or health of the pregnant woman. Yet California’s murder law defines murder as the unlawful killing of “a human being, or a fetus, with malice aforethought.” The law exempts lawful fetal euthanasia, specified emergency medical acts, conduct by the pregnant person and acts performed with that person’s consent.
In other words, California recognizes that an unborn child can be the victim of murder. The child’s legal status can turn on whether someone else consented to the act that caused the child’s death.
Recent prosecutions involving abortion drugs make the problem harder to avoid.
Mifepristone can be prescribed through telehealth and shipped by mail under federal rules. It must be prescribed by a certified provider and dispensed through an approved channel, according to the Food and Drug Administration. Yet several recent cases involve men accused of obtaining abortion medication and administering it to pregnant women without their knowledge or consent.
Illinois prosecutors accused Emerson Evans of secretly giving mifepristone to his pregnant girlfriend, including placing a pill in a smoothie. She lost the pregnancy. Evans originally faced intentional homicide charges. In 2026, he pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter of an unborn child and received a seven-year sentence.
Texas authorities charged Justin Banta with attempted capital murder after accusing him of placing abortion medication in a pregnant girlfriend’s drink. She had reportedly told him that she wanted to keep the baby. She later miscarried. Banta has denied the allegations, and no conviction has been entered.
In Ohio, former surgical resident Hassan-James Abbas pleaded no contest to charges arising from allegations that he obtained abortion medication using his former wife’s information, crushed the pills and forced them into his pregnant girlfriend’s mouth as she slept. Prosecutors said the woman had rejected his request that she have an abortion.
When a man secretly uses abortion pills to euthanize an unborn child, the law may call it homicide. If the woman consents to the use of the same pills, the law may call it health care.
The assault on the woman is plain. Drugging someone without consent is an attack on her body and autonomy. Yet that does not answer the separate question raised by fetal-homicide laws. If the unborn child can be a homicide victim when the mother wanted the child, what changes about the child’s nature when she does not?
Consent changes the legality of the act. It does not change the identity of the unborn child.
The line drawn at birth creates another contradiction. Birth is a real medical and legal event. As a measure of human value, though, it can operate like a legal fiction.
Consider two children at the same stage of development. One is delivered six weeks before the expected due date. The child is premature, receives medical care and is recognized as a legal person. The other remains in the womb at the same gestational age. The second child’s legal protection may depend on state law, medical findings and the mother’s decision.
The physical location changed. The child did not suddenly become human by passing through the birth canal or being removed through surgery.
Viability does not provide a clean moral line either. It refers to the capacity to survive outside the womb, often with medical support. That capacity can depend on gestational age, the child’s condition, available technology and the hospital providing care. A premature infant in a major medical center may receive treatment unavailable elsewhere.
This is one reason discussion of “late-term abortion” requires care. The phrase has no single clinical definition. Abortions later in pregnancy can involve grave fetal diagnoses, threats to the mother’s health or other circumstances. California law protects abortion before viability and after viability when necessary for the pregnant woman’s life or health. It does not state that every post-viability abortion is lawful for any reason.
Still, the moral question remains. At later stages of pregnancy, the distance between an unborn child and a premature newborn may be measured in location and minutes, not in any sudden change in humanity.
Federal law partly acknowledges this. The Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002 states that a child born alive at any stage of development is treated as a person under federal law. “Born alive” includes signs such as breathing, a heartbeat, pulsation of the umbilical cord or voluntary muscle movement after complete expulsion or extraction.
That law recognizes personhood after live birth, including after an attempted abortion. It does not contain the detailed treatment and enforcement provisions proposed in later legislation.
In 2025, the House passed the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. The bill would require health practitioners to provide a child born alive after an abortion or attempted abortion the same degree of care reasonably given to any other child born at the same gestational age. It would require hospital admission and create criminal penalties for failing to provide that care. Congress.gov lists the bill as having passed the House and been referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee. It has not become law because some politicians do not value the lives of the recently born.
The debate over that bill reveals the same central problem. Once the child is outside the womb and showing signs of life, the law calls the child a person. Moments earlier, at the same stage of development, the law may have treated the child’s continued existence as a matter of choice.
A recent surrogacy dispute brought this conflict into public view. McKenna West carried a child diagnosed before birth with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. West says the intended parents asked her to have an abortion. She refused and went to Texas, later seeking authority to protect the child and secure medical treatment.
The intended parents deny forcing West to end the pregnancy. Their lawyers say she initially agreed to an abortion, and the couple later decided to proceed with the pregnancy. A California court recognized them as the legal parents. West asked the United States Supreme Court to intervene. The child was born with a life-threatening heart defect and required a series of operations.
The adults had lawyers, contracts and competing parental claims. The baby had a failing heart.
Then came the Clancy trial. Clancy admitted strangling her three children. The disputed question was whether mental illness relieved her of criminal responsibility. The jury split 11 to 1, resulting in a mistrial.
The insanity defense addresses culpability. It does not deny that the killings occurred. Nor does it declare the children’s lives less valuable. Public discussion can still create that impression when nearly every expression of sympathy is directed at the accused mother.
Mental illness deserves serious treatment. Postpartum psychosis can place mothers and children in grave danger. Women experiencing it need fast medical intervention, close supervision and protection from self-harm. Their children need protection too.
Compassion for a sick mother cannot require the disappearance of her victims. Nor should the mother’s mental state become more morally visible than the terror and loss experienced by the children.
Cora, Dawson and Callan were not symptoms. They were not tragic details in a story about postpartum care. They were children with lives of their own.
Now another case has produced talk of a “copycat” killing.
Illinois prosecutors have charged Corie Walsh with murdering her 2-year-old son, Barrett. News reports state that Walsh had become invested in the Clancy trial and exchanged messages about it hours before her son was found dead. Her lawyers reject any connection between the two cases and call the copycat theory baseless. No court has established that the Clancy case caused or inspired Barrett’s death. The alleged connection remains disputed.
That factual caution matters. So does the warning raised by the sequence of events.
When public discussion dwells on the accused mother’s suffering and pushes the dead children to the margins, it creates a distorted moral picture. A vulnerable parent may hear endless sympathy for the adult, extensive discussion of legal defenses and comparatively little about the children who lost everything.
This does not prove that news coverage caused another killing. I cannot verify that. It does mean society should examine the message it sends.
The pro-life principle is simple. Human worth does not depend on whether someone is wanted, healthy, born, independent or able to speak. The unborn child facing euthanasia, the disabled baby at the center of a surrogacy fight and the young child trapped with a dangerously ill parent possess the same human dignity.
Each adult deserves due process. Each mother deserves appropriate medical care. Each juror deserves safety from harassment. A woman secretly given abortion drugs deserves protection and justice. So does her child.
The children deserve advocates before they become names in a court file.
A legal culture can show mercy to adults without forgetting justice for children. It can recognize psychiatric illness without romanticizing it. It can respect a mother’s legal rights without pretending that a child’s humanity appears at birth or depends on consent.
Some who promote religious liberty argue that “religious freedom” is tied at the hip to a “right to abort,” citing religious traditions that do not recognize unborn life in the same way. But that distorts religious freedom. Religious liberty exists to protect conscience from coercion, not to transform one person’s theology into authority over whether another human being may live. A pluralistic society can respect differing beliefs about pregnancy without pretending that the unborn child has no interests, no dignity and no claim to protection. Once religious freedom is recast as permission to end the life of a voiceless human being, it stops serving as a shield for conscience and becomes a weapon against the one person who cannot assert a competing belief.
The first question in every one of these cases should be the question our public debate keeps placing last: Who is speaking for the child?
