The Lindsay Clancy case is the natural end point for a nation that has legalized infanticide and infantilized women.
This article is a lightly-edited transcript of the “Here’s the Point” podcast by Ryan Helfenbein, executive director of the Standing for Freedom Center.
Francis Schaeffer once said, “It first becomes easy to kill children in the womb, and then if one does not like the way they turn out, to kill children after they are born.”
He was warning of the exact situation we find ourselves in today. Once you legalize infanticide, as we have in the United States; once you make it all too easy to get an abortion, whether at a clinic or inside your bathroom by taking chemical pills prescribed online by anyone, from anywhere at any time; and once you begin infantilizing women, excusing every sin under the sun, not because there is no guilt but because we live in a society where even the Jezebel will not be prosecuted in the case of children, we arrive at the case of Lindsay Clancy.
On January 23, 2023, Lindsay sent her husband out of the house on an errand. She took her five year old, three year old, and eight month old to the basement, she faced them on the ground, and she proceeded to strangle them one by one until their life left their body. She then attempted to take her own life by jumping from a second-floor window, leaving her paralyzed from the waist down.
Many of you know that story by now, but what most don’t know is this: Lindsay wasn’t abandoned by her family. Lindsay was not mistreated or abused by her husband, putting her in a desperate situation where she might be driven to harm her children. Lindsay did seek medical treatment after the birth of her third child, and by their opinion, she did not show any signs of mania or postpartum psychosis.
Only after she killed her children did they say she was critically ill and at that moment did they suggest a possible “postpartum psychosis” — but never before. Yes, she was diagnosed with a mood disorder, but it was not elevated to the level of mania or psychosis. In her multiple encounters with medical professionals from 2022 to 2023, she never once spoke of hallucinations or a male voice in her head telling her to do wicked things. She was never, at any one time, prescribed dozens of medications to deal with psychosis, mania, or bipolarity. She was early discharged from McLean Hospital after extensive evaluation, with no further change in her diagnosis.
The night she killed her children she methodically planned what she would do. She told her children, literally, to “Go to God,” while she had sent her husband on an errand. Regardless of the argumentative case of her mental state, one thing is clear: Lindsay knew exactly what she was doing. She knew that killing her children was evil. She knew there would be consequences and she sought to end her own life.
We have lost the category of good and evil. Many on the left, and a few on the right, have sought to create a victim mindset that no matter what you do and no matter how awful the action, there is some clinical disorder that absolves you from the personal guilt of killing innocent children.
Francis Schaeffer was right. We have excused murder for far too long and we have infantilized women in modern society. The argument in the pro-life movement has come full circle. For decades, we would never prosecute a woman for what she does in the womb, let alone her doctor, and we are now struggling to grapple with the guilt of a mother who would do the unspeakable to her children outside the womb.
Whether or not Lindsay was properly or improperly diagnosed for psychosis makes zero difference; we are living in an age of mass psychosis. We no longer see evil as evil. We only excuse it.
The prophet Jeremiah diagnosed the sickness of Israel and their love for idolatry, sexual immorality, and murder, saying this: “Were they ashamed when they committed abomination? No, they were not at all ashamed; they did not even know how to blush.”
This should not be a national news story. The only reason it has become national news is as a result of countless women online who have sought to defend Lindsay Clancey, while millions have been raised to support her, and people are saying the quiet part out loud. We live in a generation where the gentle sex is no longer gentle. Where the vanguards of virtue, beauty, purity, and compassion have been replaced by the harlots of drunkenness, sodomy, and violence.
Yes, there are lost boys in this generation, but the girls are lost too.
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