In the wake of the Lindsay Clancy case, more mothers are turning on their own children, illustrating the pagan horrors that return when the West forgets that children are precious in the sight of God.
On Monday morning, a 35-year-old woman was driving south on Interstate 5 near DuPont, Washington, with her two daughters, ages 9 and 15. According to the Washington State Patrol, her SUV struck a barrier, hit a semi-truck, and rolled. Once the three were out of the vehicle, she attacked the girls with a knife until three bystanders, two of them soldiers from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, took it away. The 9-year-old suffered broken bones and a stab wound.
Prosecutors have since charged the mother with attempted murder. Her older daughter told investigators that their mother woke them in the night convinced they were being followed, then threatened to kill both girls before their pursuers could. Troopers said they smelled alcohol on her after the crash.
The next morning in Northlake, Texas, a man called 911 around 4:20 a.m. to report that his wife had stabbed him. Officers sweeping the house found the couple’s 3-year-old daughter and 10-month-old son with stab wounds to their chests. Their mother, 37-year-old Holly Leeann Flores, faces three counts of attempted capital murder. Police had visited the home about five times since March, mostly for welfare concerns.
All four children survived. Illness and intoxication may explain part of what happened in those homes, and the courts will weigh the rest. But a culture reveals what it believes about children by what it permits and what it excuses, and the West is drifting back toward an answer the ancient world accepted and the Church overturned.
What Rome Allowed
In ancient Rome, a newborn’s life depended on whether the head of the household accepted it. Roman law gave the father power to reject a child and leave it to die, a practice called exposure that was legal and widespread.
In 1 B.C., a laborer named Hilarion, working in Alexandria in Roman Egypt, wrote home to his wife. In the same letter that begs her to take care of the child they already had, he gives this instruction about the next one: “If it is a male, let it live; if it is a female, expose it.”
He wrote it as ordinary household business, and in his world it was.
The early Christians rejected that pagan premise at its root. The Didache, an early church manual, commanded, “Thou shalt not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is begotten.” The Epistle to Diognetus described Christians as people who “beget children; but they do not cast away their offspring.” In 374, the Christian emperor Valentinian I made the killing of a newborn a crime of murder.
Those convictions came from Scripture, which places a child’s worth in the God whose image she bears and not in the adult deciding whether to keep her. “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in His own image” (Genesis 9:6). Children are “a heritage from the LORD” (Psalm 127:3). And Jesus rebuked the disciples who tried to keep the little ones away from Him: “Let the children come to me; do not hinder them” (Mark 10:14).
The protection children enjoyed in the West was won by that conviction, and as we’re seeing in today’s increasingly secular culture, what was won can be lost.
The Return
Rome excused child-killing by appealing to a father’s authority. The modern West is returning to it through the adult’s inner life, and the clearest sign is the one written into law: abortion. The Guttmacher Institute estimates that clinicians provided 1,126,000 abortions in the United States in 2025, the highest number since 2009. Hilarion had to wait until his daughter was born to decide that she was unwanted. Our culture lets the decision come earlier and calls it health care, but the principle is the same one Rome held: a child only lives if she is wanted.
The recent trial of Lindsay Clancy made it disturbingly obvious that this logic does not stay in the womb.
Five-year-old Cora Clancy loved princesses, and her father testified that she “just liked taking care of people.” On January 24, 2023, her mother, Lindsay, took her to the pediatrician. That evening she sent her husband out of their Duxbury, Massachusetts, home for takeout and medication, and while he was gone she strangled Cora, three-year-old Dawson, and eight-month-old Callan with exercise bands in the basement. A medical examiner testified to evidence that the children struggled.
Clancy never disputed that she killed them. Her defense argued that postpartum psychosis had taken away her responsibility, and the jury split 11 to 1, ending in a mistrial on September 4. Foreperson Roni Carlson explained what settled it for the majority: “Everything proved that she loved her children, so she had to have snapped.”
By that reasoning, love becomes evidence of illness, and illness becomes evidence of innocence. A five-year-old who had every reason to trust her mother disappears behind her mother’s interior life. Jesus built an argument on exactly that trust: “Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone?” (Matthew 7:9). The judge will hear motions on November 2 that bear on whether Lindsay Clancy is tried again.
The same excuse is moving into statute. The Boston Globe reports that about two dozen countries, including England, Wales, and Canada, give statutory leniency to mothers who kill a child during the postpartum period. Illinois passed a law in 2018 that allowed postpartum depression or psychosis to be used as a mitigating factor in sentencing, and a Massachusetts bill now under study would make perinatal psychiatric illness a mitigating factor as well.
Rome measured a child’s life against her father’s will, and these statutes measure it against her mother’s state of mind. Both rest on the pagan premise that a child’s life counts only as far as the adult standing over her allows. Scripture rejects that premise, and it warns any court tempted to excuse the guilty: “He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous are both alike an abomination to the LORD” (Proverbs 17:15).
Who Will Speak?
Michael Desronvil, the lone juror who held out in the Clancy trial, has asked the public to remember Cora, Dawson, and Callan, calling them “the ones that can’t speak for themselves.” The early Church took up that duty for three centuries before an emperor wrote it into law, and it did not wait for the culture to agree.
That work falls to the Church again. Pastors should preach the image of God plainly, including the texts that call the killing of children murder, so their people understand that a child’s worth never rests on being wanted.
Christian families can open their homes to foster and adoptive children, who are the exposed infants of our age. When a congregation knows a new mother is struggling, it should surround her with real help long before a crisis reaches the edge. And when a bill like the one in Massachusetts comes before a legislature, Christians should call their representatives and insist that the law weigh a child’s life on the same scale as an adult’s.
When Cain killed his brother, God told him, “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground” (Genesis 4:10). The blood of Cora, Dawson, Callan and other murdered babies cry out the same way, and so do the wounds of the four children who survived this week.
No court can fully answer that cry. Only the sprinkled blood of Jesus Christ speaks a better word (Hebrews 12:24), answering murdered children with justice satisfied at the cross and offering forgiveness to the guilty who confess. A mother may forget her nursing child; God said, “yet I will not forget you” (Isaiah 49:15).
He has not forgotten these children, and His people must not forget them either.
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