The trial of Lindsay Clancy has become something more than a criminal proceeding. It has become a cultural Rorschach test, and the image emerging from it is not flattering for the left. That, at least, is the argument advanced by William Sullivan in a commentary for American Thinker, who contends that the spectacle of self-identified feminists rallying around a woman who strangled her three young children is not an aberration but the logical endpoint of decades of abortion-rights activism.
The facts of the case are not seriously disputed. In early 2023, Clancy sent her husband on an errand and then, according to the source’s account, methodically strangled her five-year-old, three-year-old, and eight-month-old children using exercise bands. Neither Clancy nor her defense team denies the killings. Sullivan does not dwell on the details, noting that most readers are already familiar with them. His focus is elsewhere: on the crowds of women who have turned her trial into a cause.
For Sullivan, the moral arithmetic is straightforward. If a developed child in the womb can be legally dismembered by a doctor’s instruments, he writes, it is a short step to accepting that a mother might be justified in killing her children outside the womb. The distance between these two positions is not a leap, in his telling, but a shuffle.
He anticipates the obvious objection. Plenty of Americans oppose late-term abortion while supporting access in the first trimester, and polling bears that out. Sullivan cites data suggesting roughly 60 percent of Americans support first-trimester abortion, while about 70 percent oppose late-term abortion. By that math, a majority of the country would reject the proposition that strangling an eight-month-old or a three-year-old is justifiable.
But Sullivan is not making a polling argument. He is making a philosophical one. Whatever the cultural conditioning that separates the two scenarios in the public mind, he writes, the moral calculation behind strangling an infant is identical to the calculation behind a doctor ending a child’s life in utero. We have simply learned to treat them differently.
To bolster the point, he turns to author Megan Basham, quoting her observation that women are increasingly willing to excuse child murder because, in her estimation, at least a quarter of American women carry what she calls blood guilt they have never reckoned with. Basham’s claim is that a quarter of American women have already killed their own children, and that this explains why so many identify with the killer rather than the victims. Sullivan presents this as courageous rather than inflammatory, though readers will draw their own conclusions about the rhetoric.
What follows is perhaps the most interesting turn in the piece: an appeal to history. Sullivan argues that a century ago, feminists did not have the luxury of pretending that terminating a pregnancy was anything other than taking a life. The fact was commonly understood, he writes, as the simplest of truths.
His Exhibit A is Margaret Sanger, the Planned Parenthood founder and eugenics proponent who remains a hero to many on the left. In her 1938 autobiography, Sanger argued that contraception was always preferable to abortion, and her reasoning is one that Sullivan says is conveniently forgotten today. Sanger wrote that abortion was “the wrong way,” and that no matter how early it was performed, it was taking a life.
Sullivan notes, somewhat surprisingly, that this places Sanger in alignment with the Catholic Church on this particular question. Whatever else one thinks of Sanger’s troubling legacy — and Sullivan is clear that he thinks it deserves severe criticism — he argues that her position here was both morally sound and scientifically accurate. The problem, in his view, is not that Sanger denied the humanity of the unborn child. It is that she weighed the child’s right to life against what she framed as the mother’s right to end it. That tradeoff, he writes, should remain horrifying regardless of how early in a pregnancy it was proposed.
And so the argument circles back to Clancy. If a mother’s right to kill her child inside the womb is treated as settled and sacrosanct, Sullivan asks, on what principle do we object when that supposed right extends beyond the womb? He does not claim that a majority of women are cheering in the streets. He concedes that those rallying to Clancy’s defense may represent a minority. But he insists the minority is large, and that its sympathies run to the mother rather than to the three children she killed.
Is that sympathy really the fruit of abortion politics? Sullivan’s case rests on a moral equivalence that many readers, including many who oppose abortion, will find too crude to accept. One can believe that abortion is a grave wrong and still resist the claim that a woman who supports legal abortion is somehow complicit in infanticide. The leap from a political position to a personal pathology is precisely the kind of move that makes commentary like this easy to dismiss in polite company.
Yet the piece raises a question that is harder to wave away. The American public has spent five decades separating first-trimester abortion from later procedures, treating the line between them as a matter of moral significance rather than gestational convenience. Sullivan’s contention is that this line is arbitrary, and that a culture that has learned not to look too closely at what happens in the first trimester should not be surprised when some of its members decline to look too closely at what happened in a Massachusetts basement.
That is a provocative claim, and it is offered as opinion rather than fact. But the Clancy case has clearly touched something raw in the American psyche, and not only on the right. The crowds outside the courthouse, the petitions, the hashtags — they exist. The question Sullivan poses is why they exist, and whether the answer implicates more than the people holding the signs.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/leftists-fan-girling-over-lindsay-clancy-is-the-logical-end-of-pro-abortion-activism/