While a Plymouth County jury spends its fifth day trying to reach a verdict on Lindsay Clancy, a smaller but louder trial is already underway online, where a wing of the feminist commentariat has decided the real villain in the strangulation of Cora, Dawson, and Callan Clancy is not their mother but her hormones.
One advocacy newsletter, Radical Moms Union, wrote that “the real Lindsay was generously loving and caring,” that her “brain had betrayed her,” and asked whether society should be protecting women like Clancy rather than prosecuting them. Ms. Magazine and a wave of similar commentary have framed the case as proof America failed its mothers, not that a mother failed her children. Postpartum psychosis is real and serious. But the argument being built on top of it is not really about medicine. It is about exempting a woman from the standard of moral agency feminism spent a century demanding she be held to, and that door does not open in only one direction.
Ask the question plainly, because the activists making this argument will not ask it themselves. If postpartum hormones can override a woman’s judgment badly enough to excuse killing three children, can she be trusted to drive a car unsupervised during that same window? Can she be trusted to own a firearm? Can she be handed a high stakes leadership promotion, one where a single impaired decision might cost a company or a hospital ward far more than a bad afternoon?
Feminism’s entire modern architecture rests on the premise that a woman’s judgment is not hostage to her biology, that a woman can be trusted with the vote, the courtroom, the cockpit, and the corner office precisely because her reasoning is not a chemical accident waiting to happen. The Clancy defense circulating online carries no caveat limiting itself to postpartum weeks. It reopens, with cheerful disregard for the consequences, an argument feminists spent over a century trying to bury.
That argument has a name and a date. In 1912, the physiologist Sir Almroth Wright, one of Britain’s leading anti-suffragists, wrote that women were unfit to vote because “the mind of woman is always threatened with danger from the reverberations of her physiological emergencies.” It took decades of hard argument to bury the premise underneath that sentence, that female biology is a standing threat to female judgment. The same premise resurfaced in 1980 and 1981, when Sandie Craddock and Christine English won reduced manslaughter convictions in British courts after Dr. Katharina Dalton testified that premenstrual syndrome had diminished their responsibility. English had used her car as the murder weapon, crushing her lover against a utility pole, and walked away with a driving ban rather than prison.
The parallel to today’s driving question already happened, in a real courtroom, and it did not liberate women. It quietly entered their biology into evidence against their competence.
America ran its own version of this with a different biological alibi. When Dan White assassinated Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978, his lawyers built a diminished capacity defense around his depression, junk food cited as a symptom rather than a cause. The press mocked it as the Twinkie defense, White was convicted of manslaughter instead of murder, riots followed, and California abolished the diminished capacity defense outright in 1982, because the public understood that watering down responsibility for the worst acts a person commits does not produce mercy. It produces backlash, and eventually worse law for everyone the excuse was meant to protect.
Scripture settled this question long before any of these courtrooms existed. God told Cain, standing over his own rage before he ever touched his brother, that sin was crouching at the door and that he must rule over it, not the other way around. That command assumes the very thing the Clancy apologists are quietly discarding, that a person, whatever chemical storm is moving through her, remains the one who rules.
Feminists spent a century insisting women could bear that same rule as fully as any man. They should not spend this year unwriting it to spare one defendant, because the next time a woman is denied a promotion, a gun permit, or a driver’s license on the grounds that her hormones make her unpredictable, the paperwork excusing it will have been signed by her own defenders.
Hannah Nelson is the Vice President of American Faith Media. Any opinions or independent views expressed within this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of any affiliated organizations or publishers.
