By Judie Brown
Mothers like Lindsay Clancy and Andrea Yates spark horror in the heart and drama in the headlines. Both mothers did the unthinkable; they murdered their own children. In the wake of such brutality, the media digs deep to tell the public the story.
Clancy, a labor and delivery nurse, is allegedly suffering from postpartum depression, among other things, and is using this condition as a defense in her murder trial. Yates, who is spending her days in a mental health facility, claimed a similar defense, was initially found guilty of murder, and later found not guilty by reason of insanity.
Covering the Clancy story, one reporter explains that today the world has more empathy for killer moms than it did 25 years ago. Apparently, according to reports, more is known about postpartum depression, a condition the Mayo Clinic describes in these words: “Postpartum depression is not a character flaw or a weakness. Sometimes it’s simply a complication of giving birth. If you have postpartum depression, prompt treatment can help you manage your symptoms and help you bond with your baby.”
Given the reality of such a condition, one wonders how a mother of five or a mother of three could turn on her own children in such a vicious way, robbing them of their lives in a split second of anger, rage, depression, or only God knows what!
Stepping back and looking at these two cases from the perspective of a personhood advocate, I find it appalling that the mainstream media has not deigned to explain what decriminalized abortion could possibly have to do with such situations. It should not be a question that only a Rhodes Scholar can answer, for after all, every baby is precious, every baby is a human being, and every baby has a right to live in peace through pregnancy and after. Where is the compassion for those children?
Therein resides my problem with the focus on such mentally ill women. Both of them live in a nation that blithely protects the killing of the preborn by law, offers media dramas that suggest abortion is a cure-all for sexual mishaps, and otherwise exonerates abortion practitioners and abortion acquirers as people doing the legal thing for reasons that are not our concern.
So, when an aberrant case arises and a mother chooses to kill her born children, society reacts with horror. But every single day approximately 2,500 preborn children are murdered and society dozes. Empathy for child murders should be inclusive, not exclusively trotted out for those dead children we can see.
This conundrum requires a thoughtful analysis, and this is how we view it. The United States of America decriminalized the murder of preborn children in 1973, making the act of abortion legally and socially acceptable. Over the intervening 53 years many crimes against human beings who survived the womb have occurred, and we hasten to point out that mothers have committed many of those acts of violence. But the disconnect occurs because the society to which these murderous mothers belong condones aborting babies but chooses to prosecute mothers whose children are outside the womb.
Such a double standard is obvious, or at least it should be. Imagine the difference it would make if our nation’s laws and cultural standards equally protected every human being without exception, from her coming into being until she died. Would we live in a nation that celebrated life at every stage and yet witness such cruelty against the born members of a family?
I do not have a crystal ball, so I cannot answer that question, but logically we can all agree that when the blood of aborted babies is flowing in the life stream of our nation, bad actors will commit heinous acts. Rather than be satisfied to punish those mothers whose children we can see, perhaps we should examine why we permit practitioners to murder the children we cannot see but who are obviously there in the bellies of their expectant mothers.
Maternal depravity is sickening, but even more so is America’s decriminalized slaughter of the innocent.