Feeling vs Seeing

A few weeks ago, the trial of Lindsay Clancy – a Massachusetts woman charged with murdering her three children – concluded with a hung jury. The judge deemed it a mistrial, and Clancy’s next hearing is scheduled for early November.

On the table is not whether or not Clancy actually ended the lives of her own children, but whether or not she can be held criminally responsible for doing so. Clancy’s defense has argued that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time of the murders and should therefore be acquitted by reason of insanity. A good chunk of the broader public has come around to that position, too – in fact, many have done so quite pointedly. Moms, particularly, have rushed to Clancy’s support, expressing at various demonstrations and in online media that Clancy “could have been me” – that, had the stars aligned differently, they might have been sitting where Clancy is, having slaughtered their own kids as a result of having been pushed to the brink.

The case has raised complex and difficult questions about mental health, healthcare, and justice, as a result. But a number of people have wondered whether the tenor of that conversation hasn’t gotten a bit off-balance. In response to the outrage on behalf of Clancy, some have expressed outrage on behalf of her children. Have we lost sight of the tragedy of their deaths? they wonder. Have we spent enough time marking that injustice? The concern in this regard has been leveled not so much at Clancy, but at those who seem too ready to say that she “could have been me.” Yes, they note, serious health conditions can afflict anyone, and that’s worth noting. But postpartum psychosis is rare, and violence of this kind because of it even rarer. What feels off-balance, then, is how easily other mothers have been able to sympathize with Clancy, over and above the horror and revulsion they might otherwise feel at the loss of her kids. How easily, in other words, they have been able to understand where her experience of being pushed to the brink could have come from.

Of course, some of that concern has come with a tone of biting criticism. But what’s probably more worth criticizing than individual mothers is the culture that has shaped and formed them. For their sympathy, rather than being indicative of a moral failure on their part, simply, is a sign as well of our own cultural degeneration – the degeneration of a culture that has given itself permission to remove children from our lives whom we have deemed inconvenient. In other words: their sympathy could be taken as the natural fruit of a culture that has been upholding the justice of abortion for a long time.

Perhaps that seems like a leap, on the surface of it. But what’s striking about the pro-abortion position is that it no longer tends to hang on the distinction between a human fetus and a human person. Most aren’t making the case that a baby in utero is just a “clump of cells,” anymore. They’re admitting that baby is a person; it’s just that that person’s freedom is less important or less relevant than the parent’s. Therefore, the parents have the right to choose to dispose of them. 

The problem is that once that human-versus-not-human line has been erased, so has any substantial difference between the moral quality of killing a child inside the womb and the moral quality of killing one outside of it. What becomes strictly relevant is the parent’s autonomy, happiness, and self-perceived capacity for the child; there’s nothing in principle that would disrupt the logic that they have the authority to dispose of any child, born or unborn.

The easy sympathy toward Clancy that’s cropped up, then, is suggestive of a principle that, in a case like this, is deeply troubling: ideas tend toward consistency over time. One could say that it’s been easy for mothers to feel for Clancy because they’ve been feeling for women who opt to be unburdened of their children for decades. And of course, there’s a lot at play when it comes to Clancy’s case – the tragedy of a mental health crisis, the deficiencies of a healthcare system meant to help with that. But what’s interesting is that we haven’t tended to feel the kind of sympathy we have been for Clancy for other kinds of mental health crises, particularly those which have also ended criminally – crises that end in the death of a spouse, or a friend, or a parent. We may forgive those crimes, but we don’t so easily push to get inside of them, or to say that that “could have been me.”

Flannery O’Connor once said that sentimentalism leads to the gas chambers. Feeling too deeply in this way – for adults overwhelmed by their kids, whether those unborn or those already filling their lives in wonderful, but difficult ways – can bring us to places, morally, that are unproductive. For there are hard moral lines to be drawn here: the murder of a child is evil. It’s not justified. And to try to understand the subjectivity that would lead one to justify it can be to lose sight of the objective moral quality of such an act. And sure, there’s something to recognizing that “there but for the grace of God I go.” But to spend too much time feeling our own empathy tends to be unwise. Virgil scolds Dante for his tears on behalf of the damned. “Still like the other fools?” he says. “There is no place for pity here.”

…All of which is not to condemn Clancy. We can acknowledge the tragedy of her case. But it’s not less of an evil for being a tragedy. For there’s also the tragedy of our present culture to be mourned here, a culture which has begun to turn very far in upon itself in its self-concern. Indeed the attitudes we hold toward the value of a child’s life, the value of an adult’s life, don’t tend to end with the unique policy issue they may seem to. They affect us. They affect our collective sympathies. And they can affect our moral vision, too. “If other ages felt less, they saw more,” O’Connor also said. She’s probably right: that our age could do with less feeling, and more seeing.