The Clancy Trial and the Children Our Compassion Forgets

By Fr. Francesco Giordano ( articles - email ) | Sep 14, 2026

The murder trial of Lindsay Clancy ended on September 4 without a verdict. After nearly six weeks of testimony, the Massachusetts jury could not agree unanimously on whether she was criminally responsible for the deaths of her three children. The judge declared a mistrial, leaving prosecutors to decide whether to try the case again.

The essential facts are not disputed. On January 24, 2023, in the family’s home in Duxbury, Clancy strangled Cora, age five; Dawson, age three; and Callan, eight months old, with exercise bands. She then attempted suicide by cutting herself and jumping from a second-story window, suffering injuries that left her paralyzed. The jurors were not asked who killed the children. They were asked whether Clancy, at the time of the killings, could understand that her actions were wrong and conform her conduct to the law.

The defense argued that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis after a confused and unsuccessful course of psychiatric treatment. Prosecutors acknowledged her serious mental-health problems but pointed to evidence that, in their view, showed planning and awareness. Those of us who followed the trial from a distance should not pretend to replace the experts or the jury. Postpartum psychosis is real, grave, and potentially catastrophic. Mothers who suffer from it need prompt diagnosis, competent treatment, and protection. If Clancy was actually rendered inculpable by mental illness, to reduce this tragedy to individual wickedness would be both unjust and pastorally irresponsible.

Yet there is another danger, i.e. allowing compassion for the mother to create a story in which the children almost disappear. Women dressed in pink gathered outside the courthouse in support of Clancy. Online, the case became for many people chiefly a story about maternal suffering, failures in health care, and irresponsible prescribing. All of those matters deserve scrutiny. But Cora, Dawson, and Callan cannot become scenery in an adult’s tragedy. They were three persons entrusted to the protection of their parents and their community. The first act of justice is to say their names and refuse to forget them.

What Catholic moral teaching holds together

Catholic moral teaching offers a distinction that public discussion badly needs. An act can be objectively and gravely evil while the subjective culpability of the person who commits it is reduced, perhaps even removed, by severe psychological disturbance. The Catechism states: “Imputability and responsibility for an action can be diminished or even nullified by ignorance, inadvertence, duress, fear, habit, inordinate attachments, and other psychological or social factors” (CCC 1735).

To acknowledge possible diminished culpability does not make the victims’ dignity uncertain or alter the nature of the act. Mercy does not require us to falsify evil. It can face the evil honestly while seeking the truth about the wounded freedom of the person who committed it.

Much of the public reaction has lost that balance. The dominant question has been whether Lindsay Clancy is a victim or a criminal. The choice is too narrow. She may have been gravely ill. Her treatment may have failed her. Her moral and legal responsibility may have been profoundly impaired. At the same time, her children remain the victims of an irreversible evil. Authentic compassion does not force us to decide which human beings deserve to be seen. It embraces the suffering mother and the devastated father while keeping the three children who were killed at the center. Otherwise compassion becomes false because it becomes selective.

How abortion reshaped our vision

Why, then, has so much of the public response centered on the suffering of the mother while allowing the children to recede from view? Part of the answer lies in the moral habits through which a culture learns to perceive human life.

Moral theology teaches that repeated choices form habits. Over time, what we repeatedly do shapes what we readily see, desire, and judge. Something similar occurs within a society. Laws, institutions, language, and accepted practices educate the moral imagination, gradually teaching a people which lives command protection and which may be considered in relation to the interests of others.

This is where abortion becomes relevant. The claim is not that abortion directly caused Clancy to kill her children, or that a political position explains a psychiatric illness. The connection lies in the cultural habits through which the tragedy is interpreted. For decades, abortion has accustomed the West to viewing a child’s life through the desires, plans, fears, and psychological circumstances of adults. It has gradually altered the moral vocabulary through which we understand dependence, motherhood, and the child’s claim upon us.

Once unborn life is treated as a good subordinate to another person’s will, it becomes more difficult to defend the child’s unconditional value after birth. Before birth, the child’s continued existence is said to depend upon maternal choice. After birth, vulnerability, disability, or the burdens of care may enter calculations about “quality of life.” The circumstances and vocabulary change, but the underlying temptation remains that those with power judge the value of the weak according to their own suffering, convenience, or preferences.

Fr. Shenan Boquet, president of Human Life International, recently traced this logic in the case of Baby Gabriel, an infant born with a severe heart defect. After his surrogate mother refused an abortion, the intended parents reportedly sought to withhold standard surgery and withdraw life-sustaining care. Texas authorities intervened to protect him. As Fr. Boquet observes, this is less a new ethic than a return to the ancient practice of abandoning the weak, sick, and unwanted.

Christianity broke that logic by transforming how we see the vulnerable. The abandoned infant was no longer defective human material, but a brother made in the image of God. By entering history as a poor and dependent child, Christ placed vulnerability at the heart of revelation: “Whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me” (Mt 25:40). This conviction helped form Christian civilization.

When dignity depends on ability

The philosophical attack on that inheritance has been explicit. In Practical Ethics, first published in 1979, Peter Singer denied that membership in the human species by itself establishes an equal right to life. With Helga Kuhse, he later addressed the killing of disabled newborns directly in Should the Baby Live? The decisive criterion became the possession of certain capacities, such as self-awareness, preferences, or future-directed desires, rather than the dignity inherent in every human being. If an infant is not yet a “person” in the morally decisive sense, the infant’s life may be weighed against the interests of others.

Those arguments once sounded like provocations from the edge of academic ethics. Their premise, however, has entered ordinary moral intuition that dignity is treated as something measured by autonomy, health, consciousness, or whether another person wants us. The effects appear in debates over neonatal treatment and the lives of children with disabilities. The Clancy trial reveals a related effect upon the moral imagination. Faced with three children who are killed, our culture struggles to keep them at the center of the story.

A culture of life must protect mother and child

Two errors must therefore be avoided. One is to demonize a mother who may have been overwhelmed by severe mental illness, ignoring possible failures in treatment and the urgent need for better perinatal psychiatric care. The other is to sentimentalize the tragedy until the evil becomes indistinct and its victims nearly invisible. A culture of life must care for the mother before she falls into an abyss and protect the children whose lives depend upon her.

Some will argue that a person capable of such violence has forfeited the right to live. Yet society can protect the innocent through secure confinement without denying the offender’s dignity. Here another distinction is important: diminished culpability does not necessarily imply diminished dangerousness. A person may be so gravely mentally ill that moral or criminal responsibility is substantially impaired and yet still require prolonged secure confinement, potentially for as long as serious dangerousness persists, for the protection of others and for his or her own welfare. Conversely, the fact that someone must be confined because of dangerousness does not by itself establish full moral culpability. Justice must be capable of holding both truths together.

As St. John Paul II observed in his meditation on Cain, “not even a murderer loses his personal dignity” (Evangelium vitae, 9). The culture of life that speaks for Cora, Dawson, and Callan must therefore refuse to treat their mother as disposable. Justice protects society and imposes consequences without accepting that a burdensome or dangerous life may simply be eliminated.

That duty requires investment in prevention, maternal mental-health care, support for families, and systems able to intervene when psychosis or suicidal and homicidal thoughts appear. It also requires resistance to the claim that compassion means suspending moral judgment. Without truth, compassion follows the person best able to tell a story and overlooks those who can no longer speak.

Cora, Dawson, and Callan cannot speak. A humane society must therefore speak for them. Its task is neither to anticipate the verdict of a future jury nor to deny the complexity of a disordered mind. It must affirm that no diagnosis, however relevant to culpability, makes the children secondary. Their lives possessed an absolute value that did not depend upon health, ability, or another person’s will.

The Clancy case thus asks a question larger than the one entrusted to the courtroom. Can we still recognize in the smallest human being a good that precedes our choices and makes a claim upon us? Or have we absorbed an ethic in which the adult occupies the entire moral field and the child exists only within the adult’s experience? A civilization is measured by the place it gives those who have no voice. If we wish to rebuild a culture of life, we should begin again with three names: Cora, Dawson, and Callan. Justice and mercy, when genuine, forget no one.