If you had told a liberal activist in 1968 that in the year 2026 there would be crowds of women in pink standing outside a courthouse in support of a mother who confessed to killing her three children, that activist would have assumed you were describing some grotesque Right-wing satire, the kind of thing that gets printed in a fringe pamphlet to discredit the women's movement by attributing to it positions no reasonable person could ever hold. And yet here we are, and the crowd is real, and the pink is real, and the logic that put them there didn't arrive out of nowhere. It was built, brick by brick, over six decades of moral drift, and the people standing outside that courthouse are not betraying the abortion-rights movement of the 1960s. They are its logical conclusion, followed all the way to the end of the line, stripped of every euphemism that once made it palatable to decent people.
The original abortion argument was a desperate, narrow, defensive thing. It spoke of rape and incest, of severe foetal abnormality, of the life of the mother, of back-alley butchers and women in desperate circumstances. It pleaded, essentially, for mercy in the hardest cases, and it framed abortion as a tragic last resort rather than a good in itself. The phrase that defined the movement's respectable public face for decades was "safe, legal, and rare," a formulation that conceded the moral gravity of the act while arguing that the alternative was worse. The entire rhetorical architecture was built on the premise that abortion was a regrettable necessity, a lesser evil, something a woman did with a heavy heart when circumstances left her no humane alternative. Nobody in 1970 was marching with signs celebrating abortion. Nobody was shouting it from rooftops. The movement understood, at some deep level, that what it was asking society to permit was the ending of a developing human life, and it proceeded accordingly, with sorrow and with qualifiers and with an elaborate apparatus of euphemism designed to keep the reality of the act at a safe emotional distance. Supposedly.
Somewhere along the way, the qualifiers were discarded and the sorrow was replaced with celebration. The movement stopped arguing that abortion should be rare and started arguing that it should be unashamed. The slogan shifted from "safe, legal, and rare" to "shout your abortion," from tragedy to liberation, from last resort to positive good. Abortion doulas appeared, people whose role was to help women through the procedure with the same celebratory framing that a birth doula brings to a wanted pregnancy. The foetus was reclassified not merely as not-yet-a-person but as a kind of parasitic invader, a clump of cells, a bodily imposition whose moral status was not merely ambiguous but nonexistent. And once you grant that the unborn child has no independent moral standing whatsoever, once you establish that its right to exist derives entirely from the mother's will rather than from its own existence, you have built the foundation for everything that follows. You have not merely permitted abortion in hard cases. You have established a principle that scales far beyond anything the 1960s activists ever intended to defend.
That principle is this: a mother's sovereignty over her children, born or unborn, is near-absolute, and a child's moral status is contingent upon whether the mother wants it. The modern movement now openly defends abortion up to the moment of birth, a position that would have been unspeakable in 1970 and was considered fringe extremism even a decade ago. Elected officials are asked directly whether a baby born alive after a failed abortion should receive medical care, and they refuse to answer, because answering honestly would expose the destination toward which the whole logic has been heading. If the unborn child has no inherent claim to life, then the only thing distinguishing a 38-week foetus from a newborn is geography, a few inches of birth canal, and geography is not a moral principle. Once you erase the moral status of the child in the womb, the erasure does not stop at the cervix. It leaks outward. It becomes a general claim about the relationship between mothers and children, and that claim does not recognize the bright line that decent people assume protects the born child.
This is where the courthouse crowd comes in. The women in pink standing outside that courthouse, supporting Lindsay Clancy, are not being inconsistent with the worldview that produced abortion up to birth. They are being perfectly consistent with it. If a child's right to exist depends on the mother's will, then a mother who kills her children is not, in the final analysis, a murderer in the conventional sense. She is a woman whose suffering must be centred, whose mental health must be foregrounded, whose victimhood must be affirmed. The children become, in the narrative, almost incidental, the collateral damage of a woman failed by the system, rather than the primary victims of an unspeakable act. The postpartum psychosis framing is real and deserves genuine compassion, but notice how quickly the conversation pivots away from the three dead children and toward the mother's pain. Notice how the dead children become the backdrop for a story about medical neglect and systemic failure and a woman who needed help. That pivot is not an accident. It is the logical operation of a worldview in which the child's moral status was always contingent, always derivative, always dependent on the mother's state of mind.
And this is my reductio involving the schoolteacher, in another blog piece, is so devastating, because it strips away the one thing that makes the Clancy narrative work: the maternal frame. If a female teacher killed thirty children, the same people standing outside the courthouse would be demanding the teacher's blood. They would not hold candles. They would not speak of teacher burnout or mental-health failure or a system that let the teacher down. They would call the teacher a monster and mean it, because a teacher's relationship to children is not the relationship that the underlying axiom protects. The axiom is not "children have no moral standing." The axiom is "children have no moral standing that can override a mother's interests." The maternal relationship is the load-bearing wall of the entire structure. A teacher who kills children is an oppressor, an adult who violated a trust, a predator. A mother who kills children is a victim, because in this worldview the mother is not violating the children's rights: the children never had rights that existed independently of her will in the first place.
The 1960s liberal who fought for abortion rights would not recognize any of this. They thought they were fighting for a narrow exception in the hardest cases, a tragic mercy for desperate women. They did not imagine a world in which abortion would be celebrated, in which abortion up to birth would be defended openly, in which crowds would gather to support a mother who killed her born children. But the world they built was always heading here, because the principle they established, that a child's claim to life is contingent on the mother's desire for it, was always going to expand beyond the womb, always going to travel past the birth canal, always going to eventually encompass the born child whose mother, in her suffering, no longer wanted it. The pink vigils are not a hijacking of the movement. They are the movement, honest at last, with the euphemisms burned away and the logic finally allowed to run its full course. The arc from "safe, legal, and rare" to a courthouse full of pink-clad supporters of a confessed filicide is not a betrayal of the original cause. It is the original cause, played out to its inevitable conclusion, and the only people who find it surprising are the ones still clinging to the comforting fiction that the 1960s argument was ever about anything other than what it has now, undeniably, become.