There is a question buried inside the reaction to the Lindsay Clancy case that almost nobody wants to ask, and it is this: if a significant portion of the female population of the US and West, has concluded that women should not be held responsible for killing their children long after those children are born, then what, exactly, is the principle that would stop the logic from extending to a child of any age, and why should a thirty-year-old adult son be safer from that logic than a newborn, or a three-year-old, or a nine-month-old still in the womb? The question sounds absurd, and it is meant to sound absurd, but the absurdity is doing the work, because it allows the people who need to answer it to dismiss it as a slippery-slope fallacy rather than confront the fact that the slope is not hypothetical and is currently sliding under their feet.
The path is not difficult to trace, and it begins with the premise that a society which has accepted, and in some states legislated, the principle that a mother may end the life of her child at nine months of gestation for reasons of her own well-being has already conceded the only premise that matters. It has conceded that the moral status of the child is subordinate to the mother's autonomy. Once that concession is made, the remaining questions are not moral questions but logistical and aesthetic ones, questions of where the line happens to be drawn at the moment and how much discomfort moving it causes, and there is no intellectually honest stopping point between a viable, fully formed human being whose life is contingent on the mother's preference and a born child whose life is contingent on the mother's preference, because the only difference between the two is a few inches of travel and a change of location, and location is not a moral category. The newborn is not a different kind of being from the late-term foetus. It is the same being in a different room, and the wall between the rooms is made of nothing but sentiment.
Postpartum psychosis is real, and it is the one thing that genuinely complicates any individual case, because there is all the difference in the world between a woman who kills her children because she is floridly psychotic and a woman who kills them because she has decided they are inconvenient, and that difference is the difference between a medical tragedy and a moral crime. But the social media reaction to Clancy is not actually about psychosis, and that is the tell. The "Same, Lindsay" response treats the killings as an extension of ordinary, universal, relatable maternal exhaustion, and that is not a medical claim but a moral one, and it is exactly the claim that unravels the whole category, because it asserts that the line between being tired of one's children and ending one's children is a matter of degree rather than kind. That is not solidarity with untreated illness. That is the erosion of filicide itself as a category, the slow replacement of an unthinkable act with an understandable one, and every time the phrase is repeated the unthinkable recedes a little further.
The reason the absurdist path does not yet run to the thirty-year-old adult son is not that the logic fails but that the society still feels the weight of the line it has not crossed, and that feeling is doing all the moral work, which is precisely the problem, because a morality that depends on a feeling of revulsion is a morality with no foundation, and feelings can be trained away. You can watch it being trained away in real time, in the people who insist that a woman's frustration with her children is the same thing as the act of killing them, just further along a spectrum, and every repetition of that framing moves the revulsion a little further out, and the revulsion is the only thing standing between viable-and-unwanted and born-and-unwanted and, eventually, thirty-years-old-and-unwanted. The logic will happily take you all the way there. It has no internal brake. Whatever stops it will have to come from somewhere else, from a conviction that the child's life has a status that does not depend on the mother's frame of mind, and that conviction is exactly what the current moment is busy dismantling.
So the answer to "why not" is an uncomfortable one, because the honest version is that there is no reason within the current logic, and the people running the current logic have not thought through where it ends because they do not want to, and when they are shown where it ends they will accuse you of a slippery-slope fallacy. The line has to be redrawn somewhere, and it has to be redrawn on principle rather than on revulsion, because the revulsion is fading. Either the child's life has a status independent of the mother's preference, or it does not, and if it does not, then the only thing protecting the thirty-year-old son is a social convention, and a social convention can be dissolved the same way the convention protecting the newborn is being dissolved now, one sympathetic story at a time, until the thing that once seemed unthinkable is simply the next thing being debated.
That is not an absurdist hypothetical. It is a description of the present moment, and it is why the reaction to Clancy matters far more than the verdict. A trial can establish what one woman did and whether she was responsible for it, but it cannot restore the category that the reaction is busy dissolving, and the category is the only thing standing between a society that treats the killing of one's own children as the gravest of crimes and a society that treats it as a misfortune to be managed. The absurdist path is not a prediction. It is a trajectory, and it is being walked right now, and the only question left is whether anyone is willing to say, out loud, that the line exists and that it must hold, before the revulsion that once marked the line disappears entirely and there is no one left who remembers why it was there.
https://michaeltsnyder.substack.com/p/the-connection-between-the-lindsay