Why are women who kill their children treated differently from men who kill their children? There are many cases.
Originally posted at American Thinker
Maybe if Adam had slapped the apple out of Eve’s hand, the world wouldn’t be in the pickle it’s in. The story holds that in the Garden of Eden, Eve opened the door to death when she ate the forbidden fruit, yet when God demanded an explanation, he addressed the man, not the woman.
Throughout history, the consequences of similar actions seem to have been greater for men than for women.
Penalties for both, yes. But greater culpability for the man, also yes.
Women like to pretend they are autonomous beings who exercise the right to choose with impunity. Yet, when women kill children outside the sterile environment of a clinic, they blame their actions on diminished agency, mental illness, victimization, and physical helplessness.
For women, abortion = autonomy, murder = mental incapacity. Perpetrators of paternal filicide are afforded none of those excuses.
When caught with three dead children and an exercise band in her hand, a mother, and in this case, Clancy, retreated behind a fig leaf of delicacy, frailty, and the oppressive dominance of a male-driven society.
In popular culture, when a woman kills her children, the strong-woman narrative shifts to: “Oh my God, what happened to her?” “Is she mentally ill?” “Was she abused or controlled by a man?” “Did the medical/pharmaceutical complex damage her?”
On the one hand, pro-choice culture excuses women for disposing of generations of offspring as rational; but then that same culture makes excuses if she murders her babies after they’re born. But if a man kills his child, just as in the Garden, he’s held to a different standard and portrayed as dangerous, testosterone-driven, evil, and aggressive. Same atrocity, different defense.
Men are afforded no wiggle room, sympathy, or blame-shifting. It’s odd that, in a feminized ethos that emphasizes women’s sound mental capacity when it comes to ending billions of pregnancies worldwide over the past half-century, our culture seems more willing to quickly assign madness to a mother who then murders the children she let survive the womb, and to label as monstrous a man who has never chosen to abort a child but does the same.
Evidence supports this, so let’s review some facts. A 2024 forensic psychiatry practice resource published by the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law reports that female defendants are more likely than male defendants to be found not guilty by reason of insanity and to be diverted to psychiatric facilities.
Remember Andrea Yates and Timothy Jones Jr.? Each killed five of their children. At trial, both relied heavily on insanity defenses supported by evidence of psychosis. In the end, free-agent Yates received a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. If Yates had offed her children one by one in an abortion clinic, she’d be awarded a self-ruling medal of honor by Planned Parenthood, but for submitting her five children to an afterbirth abortion, she’s deemed insane and gets to live in a low-security psychiatric facility, doing arts and crafts, reading, sewing, and participating in therapeutic activities.
Meanwhile, Jones, who has no say in whether his children are aborted, presented substantial evidence of psychosis and expert testimony that he was legally insane. His insanity defense was rejected. When his time comes, South Carolina law will allow him to choose between lethal injection and the firing squad; otherwise, electrocution is the default.
Both are certifiable: one walks around in street clothes, while the other is a dead man walking.
Let’s move on.
Claiming God ordered her to kill her children, Deanna Laney killed her two sons with rocks and severely injured her third. Laney was also found not guilty by reason of insanity. John Allen Rubio decapitated three very young children, believing they were possessed by witchcraft. His insanity plea was rejected by a Texas jury. He was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death.
Deanna, insane; Rubio, clearly delusional and psychotic, sentenced to death.
Also from Texas, a state not shy about executing murderers, Lisa Ann Diaz drowned her 3- and 5-year-old daughters. Lisa was tried only for her older daughter’s death and found not guilty by reason of insanity. The defense? She was psychotically delusional and saving them from terminal illness, which is somewhat like the case of altruistic Lindsay Clancy, who strangled her three children to death, imagining they would be better off dead and safer with her in heaven, a presumptuous assumption on her part. Nonetheless, the problem for Clancy, who was extremely efficient at murder, was that she proved much less efficient at suicide.
Amid religious delusions involving God, demons, and the Antichrist, Andre Thomas wiped out his estranged family: his wife, 4-year-old son, and 13-month-old stepdaughter. He then gouged out his own eye. The court record acknowledged severe mental illness and psychotic delusions. Thanks to the curse of testosterone, things did not go well for Andre. The jury rejected insanity, convicted him of capital murder, and sentenced him to death. It remains to be seen whether the male voice in Lindsay Clancy’s head will serve her better than it did death-row inmate Andre Thomas.
It seems the justice system—and perhaps the female excuse-making philosophy surrounding it—is more inclined to interpret a woman’s violence as stemming from mental illness, in ways that diminish responsibility or reinforce victimhood, than to interpret a man’s violence similarly. How does that tendency further reinforce the strength of girl power that’s been beating us over the head ad nauseam for almost half a century?
Not only that, but women whom courts tend to think are, by nature, incapable of violence or hatred are responsible for ending billions of pregnancies worldwide over the past half-century. And the demographic effect doesn’t necessarily end there: many of those never-born children would eventually have had children and grandchildren of their own. The full generational impact of those decisions is impossible to calculate, but the number of lives that never entered subsequent generations, thanks to women exercising their supposed cogent right to choose, would likely far exceed the original number of abortions.
So much for the delusional belief that females are the kinder, gentler sex.
In a study of filicide, attorneys presented with a fictional child-killing case were more likely to attribute the female perpetrator’s act to mental illness and to employ the insanity defense on her behalf, while attributing the male perpetrator’s act to jealousy or retaliation and recommending that the male perpetrator receive a 15-year prison term.
The atrocities are comparable, but the duplicity is stunning.
If the madness-driven murder is comparable, perhaps it is men—not women—who should be asking where their equal treatment went.
It is true that psychosis, in either a man or a woman, can severely impair a person’s grasp of reality. But that’s not at issue here. At issue is whether a society that insists women are equal to men is also willing to strip away the insanity fig leaf from Eve and apply the same threshold of criminal responsibility when, regardless of the sex of the perpetrator, the brutality, psychosis, and guilt are comparable. Either that, or recognize that if men and women are equal, Adam’s motives, actions, and excuses should be no more suspect than Eve’s.
