The Clancy jury in Plymouth, Massachusetts, was just dismissed from a mistrial. Seven days of deliberation, three notes to the judge, one holdout who refused to budge, and Lindsay Clancy walks away from a first-degree murder conviction, at least for now. Three children strangled with exercise bands in a Duxbury basement. Cora, five. Dawson, three. Callan, eight months. And outside the courthouse, hundreds of women in pink, holding signs that read "Believe" and "She Needed Help."
Not "Justice for Cora." Not "Remember Dawson." Not "Callan Deserved Better." She needed help.
This is not a glitch. This is not a one-off outpouring of misplaced sympathy. This is a preview. The Clancy trial is the canary in the coal mine, and the canary isn't just dead: it's been strangled while the miners hold up signs supporting the gas.
Let's be blunt about something the press avoids: this happened in one of the bluest states in the union. Massachusetts, where abortion is unrestricted, where the medical establishment bends over backward to affirm every progressive orthodoxy, where the idea that a mother could be held criminally responsible for killing her own children is apparently so controversial that twelve people couldn't agree on it after a month and a half of testimony.
The state that gave you Roe's spiritual homeland also gave you a deadlocked jury over whether strangling three kids with exercise bands while your husband is out picking up takeout, constitutes murder.
This is not a coincidence. This is a logical endpoint. When you spend fifty years arguing that a child in the womb is not a child, that its moral status depends entirely on whether the mother wants it, you are not just making an argument about the first trimester. You are rewiring the culture's entire moral architecture around the parent-child relationship. You are establishing a principle: the mother's mental state determines the child's humanity. Once that principle is embedded deeply enough, it doesn't stop at the cervix.
Australians have already proven the point. Between 2010 and 2020, Victoria and Queensland alone recorded 724 babies born alive after attempted abortions who were simply left to die. That's one per week. In Western Australia, 27 babies between 1999 and 2016. Baby Jessica Jane, born at 22-23 weeks in a Northern Territory hospital bathroom after a failed abortion, healthy, good APGAR score, 515 grams, was examined by a nurse and then set aside to die. Not because she was dying. Not because she was deformed. Because she was unwanted.
The Queensland health guidelines actually provided a framework for this: if a baby is born alive after an abortion, doctors are instructed to "not provide active treatment" unless the baby is above a certain gestational age. In practice, this meant leaving breathing, heart-beating infants on a table until they stopped.
The Human Rights (Children Born Alive Protection) Bill 2022 tried to fix this. It said, essentially: if a baby is born alive, it's a person, and you have to treat it like one. The fact that such a bill was necessary: that we needed legislation to state that a living, breathing human infant outside the womb deserves medical care, tells you everything about where the Overton window had drifted.
And the bill faced fierce opposition. Because mandating care for a born-alive infant was framed as an attack on women's "reproductive rights." Read that again. The right to "reproduce" now apparently includes the right to ensure the product of reproduction dies, even after it's fully delivered and breathing air.
The standard progressive response here is to scream "slippery slope fallacy" and insist that abortion has nothing to do with infanticide, that born-alive protections are a red herring, that no one is actually advocating for killing born children.
The Clancy trial exposes this as a lie. Not because anyone is explicitly arguing for infanticide as policy, not yet, but because the emotional and moral infrastructure is already built. The machinery is in place. The sympathies are aligned.
Look at the logic deployed by Clancy's defenders:
She was suffering. Postpartum psychosis, bipolar disorder, a "dizzying rotation of medications." The system failed her.
She wasn't herself. The loving mother was real; the killer was the illness.
We need to understand, not judge. The more horrific the act, the more interested we should be in what drove her to it.
This is about all mothers. Her case is a "rallying cry" for maternal mental health.
Every single one of these arguments maps perfectly onto the existing abortion-rights framework. Replace "postpartum psychosis" with "unwanted pregnancy." Replace "the system failed her" with "her body, her choice." Replace "she wasn't herself" with "it's not a person yet." The emotional logic is identical: the mother's suffering is the only morally relevant fact. The child's existence, whether five years old, three years old, eight months old, or eight months gestation, is secondary. The child is the problem that the mother's suffering justifies solving.
This is not slippery slope reasoning. This is pattern recognition. When a culture decides that a child's right to live is contingent on the mother's psychological state, the age of the child becomes a detail, not a principle. Five years is just a bigger number than five months.
Now project forward to see the merger with active euthanasia. The same logic that says a suffering mother should not be held responsible for ending her children's lives will, in time, be applied to suffering children themselves, and suffering elderly parents, and suffering spouses, and suffering anyone whose existence is deemed a burden.
Canada is already there. MAID, Medical Assistance in Dying, was supposed to be for terminally ill adults with foreseeable death. Then it expanded to those with "grievous and irremediable" conditions. Then they started discussing "mature minors." Then they started offering it to people whose only condition was poverty, or depression, or housing insecurity. The CBC ran stories about disabled veterans being offered euthanasia when they called about wheelchair ramps.
The Netherlands has been doing euthanasia for psychiatric conditions for years. Belgium allows it for children. The logic is inexorable: if suffering justifies ending life, and if the person doing the suffering gets to define what "unbearable" means, then there is no principled stopping point. A five-year-old with autism? A three-year-old with cerebral palsy? An eight-month-old with Down syndrome? At what point does the child's suffering, or the parent's suffering on behalf of the child, become sufficient grounds?
The Clancy trial is a dry run for the moral reasoning that will be deployed when the first parent euthanises a disabled child and the pink-clad crowds show up outside the courthouse. "She was suffering." "The system failed her." "She needed help." "This isn't about the child, it's about the mother's mental health."
The same people who spent a decade arguing that abortion is healthcare will spend the next decade arguing that infanticide-by-mother is a mental health crisis requiring compassion, not punishment. And after that, they'll argue that medicalised infanticide, clean, clinical, administered by professionals, is the humane alternative to mothers snapping in basements.
What connects Roe v. Wade to born-alive abandonment in Australia to the Clancy mistrial to the coming euthanasia expansion, is a single philosophical commitment: personhood is conferred, not inherent.
In this view, you are not a person by virtue of being a living member of the species Homo sapiens. You are a person because someone, your mother, the state, the medical board, decides you are. You become a person when you are wanted. You cease to be a person when you become inconvenient. Your humanity is a social construct, a legal designation, a gift that can be given and revoked. This is not new. This is the logic of every genocide in history. The only variable is which group gets declared subhuman this decade.
The Clancy children were wanted, until they weren't. They were persons, until their mother's psychosis decided otherwise. And now 11 of the jury, and thousands of women in pink, and the entire machinery of progressive sympathy, has decided that the mother's mental state is the only thing worth discussing. The children are props. Their deaths are a "tragedy" in the abstract, something that happened to Lindsay, not something Lindsay did.
The trajectory is clear. Here's what the next decade looks like if this continues unchecked:
Phase One (now): Mothers who kill their children are reframed as victims of a failed mental health system. Criminal responsibility is eroded. Postpartum psychosis becomes the new "temporary insanity" for infanticide. Convictions become rare; mistrials become common.
Phase Two (soon): The same logic is extended to other caregivers: fathers, grandparents, nurses. Anyone whose "suffering" leads them to end a dependent's life is eligible for the mental-health defence. The standard for criminal responsibility in caregiver killings collapses.
Phase Three (within a decade): Medicalised infanticide for "severe" cases enters the conversation. Why wait for mothers to snap when we can provide compassionate, clinical termination of suffering children? Belgium and the Netherlands have already normalised paediatric euthanasia. The Clancy case becomes the cautionary tale used to argue for expanding access: "if only she'd had a legal, medical option, those children wouldn't have had to suffer."
Phase Four (within fifteen years): Euthanasia for any dependent whose caregiver finds their burden "unbearable." Elderly parents. Disabled spouses. Chronically ill children. The standard shifts from the patient's suffering to the caregiver's suffering. The right to die becomes the duty to die.
This is not alarmism. This is extrapolation from existing trends. Every single step in this chain is already happening somewhere in the Western world. The only question is how fast the American empire adopts what the European vanguard has already normalised. And Australia will follow behind.
The Clancy children are dead because their mother killed them. That is a fact. The jury couldn't decide if that fact constitutes murder because the culture has spent two generations teaching that a mother's psychological state is more morally significant than her children's lives.
You cannot build a civilisation on the principle that the strong get to decide whether the weak are persons. You cannot teach that the unborn are disposable and then act surprised when the born become disposable too. You cannot spend decades arguing that "wantedness" determines humanity and then clutch your pearls when a mother decides she no longer wants her five-year-old.
The arc of the moral universe does not bend toward justice on its own. Left to its own momentum, it bends toward death, because death is easier than responsibility, and compassion for killers is cheaper than protecting the vulnerable.
The women in pink that were outside that Plymouth courthouse thought that they were standing for maternal mental health. They were actually standing at the edge of a cliff, and beneath them is a darkness that has swallowed every civilisation that ever decided that some lives matter less than others' convenience.
The Clancy children had names. Cora. Dawson. Callan. They were persons. Not because Lindsay wanted them. Not because the state recognized them. Not because a jury could agree on what to call their deaths. They were persons because they were alive, and they were human, and that used to be enough.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z19Br2SfG7k