The first batch of names are of the Clancy children. The second, the Yates children. They are all the names of young children killed by their mothers.
I wish Cora, Dawson, and Callan could somehow meet Noah, John, Luke, Paul, and Mary.
Perhaps they have. Those would be eternal encounters of the sort we can’t quite report on here and now.
The first batch of names are of the Clancy children (you can learn a little about them — and see their faces — at the family memorial foundation). The second, the Yates children (their father also set up this). They are all the names of young children killed by their mothers.
Cora was five years old. Dawson, three. Callan was eight months old.
Noah was seven. John was five. Paul was three. Luke was two. And Mary was six months old. (I wrote about them many times, including here in 2006.)
Cora, Dawson, and Callan are in the news because of the ongoing trial of Lindsay Clancy, currently being live-streamed. But 25 years ago, Andrea Yates drowned her five children in a bathtub in the suburban Houston home she shared with her husband, Rusty.
The photos we see most often involving the Clancy trial are screenshots from live-stream images of the accused or her fan base outside the courtroom. Most of the photos of the children alive and smiling you might have seen are from family websites. That’s not propaganda; it’s fact. They were innocents who were killed by their mother.
Their mother must have been sick to do it. It’s not natural for a mother to kill her child.
Is she bipolar? Did the cocktail of drugs make her not herself?
I don’t know. Neither do you. And unless you’re in the conspiracy-theory weeds, what we both do know is Lindsay Clancy viciously murdered her children, one by one.
Motherhood is hard — excruciatingly so, at times. Mental illness can be an unbearable cross. These things all exist on a spectrum, the experts tell us. And yet, for all of us with social-media accounts or voices to opine in actual in-person encounters, there’s pressure to weigh in. (I’ve had many a conversation with an Uber driver about things that suggest we both need better hobbies.) So there’s Team Lindsay and there is Team Anti-Killer Mom. The sane – if I may – place to be is probably to acknowledge a horrific crime and reaffirm that motherhood is the most important job in the world and deserves to be honored as such in every possible way.
That includes recognizing it is evil for a mother to kill her child.
Every single time I see the faces of Cora, Dawson, and Callan, I can’t help but think of Noah, John, Luke, Paul, and Mary. These are different cases, but many aspects feel familiar.
As People magazine recently recalled, in the Yates case:
Her attorneys argued that [Andrea Yates] had suffered from postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis, and that weeks before the murders, her doctor had taken her off of the powerful antipsychotic drug Haldol.
Back then, the National Organization for Women set up a defense fund for Andrea Pia Yates. I wrote about it here. I had actually forgotten that back in the day Katie Couric on the Today show was actively encouraging people to donate to her defense fund.
We didn’t have TikTok influencers, but there was a cult of women that developed around Yates, too. There was even a documentary made on the cult phenomenon.
She was at first convicted of capital murder, but the verdict was reversed four years later; she was found “not guilty by reason of insanity.”
The cult of Andrea Yates was so strong that People decided to do a quarter-century tribute of sorts.
Andrea’s ex-husband Rusty, 61, tells PEOPLE about his life with Andrea, and why he still visits her once a year at a Kerrville, Texas, mental health facility nearly 25 years after the death of their children.
“I try once a year to visit in person and we text back and forth some and talk on the phone some,” Rusty says. “Andrea and I always got along. That’s a time of our life that we both cherish and she’s the only person I can talk to about it. She and I are the only two who can get together and reminisce about what it was like to enjoy those years together.”
While the identifying with Lindsay Clancy on social media and inside and outside the courtroom is clearly out of control, it is also not new. Some of the gentle approach to her is good — we do need to do a better job with medicine across the board (I mentioned this yesterday in another context involving women), and, please, when handing out mood-altering prescriptions.
But there’s also a very non-chic question that must be asked: Do we believe that is it evil, unnatural, and wrong for a mother to kill her child?
I ask this as someone who regularly advises people to be careful about their language when talking about abortion. Most Americans have been touched by abortion in some way — and every mention of it in the news, especially politics, can be salt poured into an open wound, a death, frankly, that is not allowed to be grieved.
And, of course, many do not see abortion as murder, especially in the early months. We live at a time when infanticide is tolerable. We may not eagerly or all that consciously even admit to it, but it is so.
My friend Charlie Camosy just wrote about it in a book coming out next year from Ignatius Press. He previewed it in a column this week. Remember Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, a pediatric neurologist, saying the quiet part out loud? “The infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”
As Camosy remembers:
This was apparently so common that Northam was taken aback by the massive backlash to his remarks. A window into the culture he inhabited was revealed in an article in the Journal of Perinatology, which indicated that some physicians responsible for the care of newborns understand the decision to offer medical care to an older infant or child as saving someone with a disability, but for a younger infant, they consider offering medical care as creating someone with a disability.
You don’t need a memory, though, to look at one of the surrogacy cases in the news right now.
McKenna West is being sued for wrongful birth because she didn’t kill the child she was in a contractual agreement to carry for a couple. She went to Texas to deliver the child, where it would be illegal to have an abortion or let the child die after delivery. In California, either could have happened — because the biological parents’ intention was a dead child, they wanted an abortion and so even if he was delivered, life-sustaining medical intervention could have been refused.
That’s why a judge intervened in Texas. As Charlie writes:
In not a few cases, parents aim at the death of children after birth for exactly the same reasons many aim at their deaths before birth. Indeed, the Texas attorney general’s office, in its court filing, said that “the intended parents have stated they will refuse consent” to the medically indicated treatment and “they may seek to move the child to California so that treatment can be withheld there.” The Texas judge, in agreeing that the baby needed legal protection after birth, wrote: “The evidence before the Court raises substantial question whether medically indicated, life-sustaining treatment will be provided to the child upon birth, and whether the child may be removed from this State before that question can be heard.”
The baby in this case — a real, living newborn — is referred to as Gabriel to those partial to the surrogate mother and Rumi by Team Bioparents. I doubt we’ll see photos of the child anytime soon — it would humanize the baby. Right now, we’re talking about adult desires.
The Gabriel/Rumi situation, is, of course, different than the Clancy and Yates children. He is alive. But there is a fundamental question that is the same that each of these lives prompts:
What about the child?
What is best for the child?
And what on earth are we saying and doing culturally that is making mothers feel like a woman who killed her children makes them feel seen?
Have we done something culturally over the last half century to mainstream a life-and-death struggle between a mother and her child? The stakes for both are rarely even. My career. My travel. They have officially been put on par with my cancer diagnosis or sepsis. To make the former seem less harsh, the latter is becoming commonplace. Not because of the specifics of the law, but the alarmism of the propaganda that is making it de facto so.
These are questions that are separate from how can we better treat depression and anxiety, postpartum depression, and even psychosis.
Cora, Dawson, Callan, Noah, John, Luke, Paul, and Mary give us names and faces.
Pray for Gabriel/Rumi.
And pray that we do better by the innocents — and their mothers. Celebrate motherhood. Give mothers the reverence and resources they need and deserve.
And never forget that what’s evil is evil. And evil is wrong. Whatever the cause.
We don’t make excuses. We pray for wisdom for mercy and justice. And we do better.
Or do we?
We seem to be on a trajectory that refuses to ask the questions that would help us to reject evil and embrace the good. The good is the norm. Imperfect sinners though we are, with wounds and brokenness, we desire the good. We want to be good, be better. We need to acknowledge our weaknesses and the gaps in resources. We need to be honest about what we’ve done wrong and call out scandals in even mainstream medical protocols and oversights.
Are euphemisms for evil having the effect of having people find evil more relatable than the good? That’s some of what we are watching right now. It helps explain why no example of grave brutality involving mothers and children ever seems to be enough to have us come to a cultural unanimity in pleading for mercy. Enough with the violence. Enough with the euphemisms. Enough with the cults of mothers who kill, even if they were deeply depressed and deserved better help. Enough.
Do not hinder the children.
Love their mothers.
Do not commodify children or exploit women as gestational surrogates.
Do not pit a mother against her child or separate a child from the mother he’s known for the life of a pregnancy — the only one he will ever know, where real things happen in both the mother (not an incubator) and the child.
We can do this. We can begin again.
No judgment.
Just reordering our decisions — personally, legally, morally, all — around reverence for innocent human life and the needs of the most vulnerable. That’s how we get to a healthy culture that’s not drowning in darkness but living life-giving love, not as islands, but as real people in relationship with other humans, dependent on one another.
This would be good. It happens. It doesn’t make headlines. But it is good.