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In January 2023, Lindsay Clancy allegedly murdered her three young children — ages 5, 3, and 8 months — and then attempted to take her own life. As details emerged about Clancy’s mental state, postpartum struggles, and the horrific method of killing, many people began speaking about her not as a mother who had murdered her children but as a woman who had been suffering and needed compassion.

Outside the courthouse last week, women gathered — dressed in pink shirts and forming hearts with their hands — as a demonstration of their solidarity with a mother who is on trial for strangling her children. One of the women expressed sympathy and confessed, “It could be me.” A licensed therapist said, “Many of us see ourselves in Lindsay,” and described many women as “one step away” from murdering their children. Those defending Clancy have focused on how the medical system and society failed her. As a result, public sentiment is divided over whether she should be held criminally responsible for the killings.

There is nothing wrong with calling attention to psychosis or demanding accountability from the pharmaceutical industry and medical community for the misuse of potentially harmful medications. But the growing identification with Clancy raises a more pertinent question: Should compassion for a woman who has committed a violent crime lead us to acquit her for it?

That question presents an uncomfortable mirror for the pro-life movement. Should Clancy’s circumstances transform the perpetrator into a victim and, ultimately, eliminate her criminal culpability? While many conservatives answer that justice for the Clancy children should prevail, conservative culture has operated the opposite way regarding prenatal children. For decades, the pro-life movement has maintained its own category of women who participate in the killing of their children — and its response to them mirrors the rhetoric now used by those trying to excuse Clancy.

In response to the ongoing trial of Lindsay Clancy, the woman who killed her three children in 2023, it seems women across the country are trying to quiet their consciences by swapping out pink pussy hats for pink T-shirts. These sympathizers have also raised more than $1 million for Clancy’s supportive parents. That stunning sum is akin to awarding a Golden Globe to an actress who publicly credits killing her offspring with advancing her career.

Was Clancy pro-abortion? Maybe she was. Maybe she wasn’t. Either way, the more revealing question isn’t what Clancy believed about abortion; it’s what the women rallying around her believe about when it’s morally acceptable to take innocent life. Thus, scarier than the woman in the courtroom, sitting in a wheelchair and staring blankly into space, are the hordes of women who may be finding solace and justification for the intentional ending of innocent human life somewhere else in the life cycle.

Is invoking Clancy’s mental illness to mitigate responsibility for her actions fundamentally different from invoking “health care” to justify abortion because a woman believes giving birth would cause her undue stress or derail her professional life? Abortion supporters can cite “reproductive freedom” all they want. That’s how it starts. The methodical murder of more than 65 million unborn human beings since Roe v. Wade is nothing more than permissible slaughter. But more important than which euphemisms we use for abortion and filicide is the message being sent to women who may come to believe that their overwhelming circumstances justify disposing of the unborn.

Under this moral framework, the prohibition is no longer simply, “It is wrong to intentionally end an innocent human life.” It has become, “It is wrong — unless circumstances make it permissible.” Even research on homicidal violence has identified this moral threshold: Many people condemn homicidal violence in principle, while identifying circumstances where they find it permissible. This concept applies to the Clancy case, where her female supporters appear to argue that even the irreversible decision to strangle three children is defensible based on circumstances.