by Stephen Soukup
Several generations of girls have been raised to believe that a woman's independence and mental health constitutionally override any dependent's claim on her.
This past week, the nation was, once again, bitterly and politically divided over an episode that should, by all rights, have had nothing to do with politics. The courtroom proceedings involving a woman accused of killing her own children and then attempting to kill herself should have been “news” only to those morbidly fascinated by human nature at its worst and most vulnerable moments. Instead, however, the omnipresence of politics in our society turned the trial of Lindsay Clancy into a national obsession for a few days, at least. Left-leaning women lined up in support of the murderous mother, insisting that she was not legally responsible for those murders, that she had suffered a bout of postpartum psychosis and, therefore, did not have the capacity to understand the iniquity and severity of her actions.
Right-leaning commentators—men and women—reacted in turn to the fervency of Clancy’s supporters. Murder is murder, they insisted. Moreover, the evidence suggested premeditation, not a psychotic break. Of course, what really bothered those on the right, Clancy’s detractors, was the very existence of those on the left, Clancy’s supporters. The fact that there exists an organized, animated, and sizable contingent of people who would consciously choose to lionize a child-murderer and to lend her their political, spiritual, and financial support served as proof that there is something profoundly wrong in our society, something ugly, something monstrous.
Part of this, of course, is the familiar story of the politicization of everything, the incidental but defining characteristic of classical, post-Enlightenment liberalism that turns every issue or disagreement into a competition between factions. A bigger part of it, though, is the direct, intentional politicization of everything having to do with women, which started as a cultural movement in the 1960s and morphed into the creation of an entirely new constitutional order.
It is fitting, in a way, that the conclusion of the Clancy trial took place during the same week in which Gloria Steinem died. Steinem was the most prominent and publicly important figure in the second wave of feminism. Others—like Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, and Germaine Greer—were more important to the movement intellectually. But Steinem was its public face, the engaging, attractive face of a movement that often embraced unattractive ideas.
Second-wave feminism gave us the now ubiquitous term for the notion that everything in our lives is political, whether we like it or not. Whereas classical liberalism provided the forces that made everything political, second-wave feminism gave women—and society more generally—permission to embrace those forces. Whereas the politicization of all things had previously been viewed as a negative, destructive development, second-wave feminism turned it into a mantra and, as such, a social ethos. “The personal is political” is a phrase that is most commonly attributed to the second-wave feminist activist Carol Hanisch, but, as she has said repeatedly, she did not invent it. It had been circulating throughout feminist circles for some time, and she merely put it into print. As Steinem herself once said, attempting to pin down the originator of the phrase was akin to trying to identify the author of the term “World War II.” The “personal is political” was, simply, the animating spirit behind the 1960s feminist revival.
That revival, of course, reached its apex on January 22, 1973, when the Supreme Court of the United States issued its decision in Roe v. Wade. Roe did two things. First, it operationalized the yearnings of second-wave feminism, giving women complete control over their bodies and their sexuality, turning all decisions about sex, motherhood, and, by extension, reliance on males into a “choice,” something that they could freely and unilaterally decide, without input or interference from anyone else. Second, and more importantly, Roe changed the entirety of the American constitutional order, creating out of whole cloth (or judicial robe cloth, if you prefer) a new and inviolable negative right that applied to only half of the population.
Almost unarguably, the most important aspect of the abortion debate in this country was the means by which it was decided. Abortion had been a highly and heatedly debated issue throughout the previous decade across the West. In all nations but one, the matter was settled by political means, i.e., legislatures wrote and passed laws, making abortion a part of the political process and the legal code. Ironically, while second-wave feminism sought to politicize everything else, the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe took abortion out of the political realm and placed it in an even higher realm, the realm of constitutional rights. In so doing, it changed the way abortion was perceived by its supporters.
When the Court rewrote the abortion laws of the states by virtue of its conclusion that abortion was protected under the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments, what it did was to create a constitutional right to abortion. The fundamental human rights traditionally associated with the Bill of Rights—speech, religion, arms, speedy trial, etc.—suddenly had a new and fully equal companion right, the right to an abortion. Indeed, some scholars, most notably Russell Hittinger, argued that between Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court established a regime in which abortion was the preeminent and defining right in the constitutional order. Hittinger, who was then the William K. Warren Chair of Catholic Studies and a Research Professor of Law at the University of Tulsa, put it this way thirty years ago:
In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), the Supreme Court made abortion the benchmark of its own legitimacy, and indeed the token of the American political covenant. To those who cannot agree with the proposition that individuals have a moral or constitutional right to kill the unborn, or that such a right defines the trans-generational covenant of the American political order, the Court urged acceptance out of respect for the rule of law. “If the Court’s legitimacy should be undermined,” the Court declared, “then so would the country be in its very ability to see itself through its constitutional ideals.”
What this meant in the real world was that the second-wave feminists and other supporters of “choice”—those who defined their politics in terms of “women’s issues” and the rights of women—came to see abortion not as a fundamental right, but as the fundamental right, the one to which all other rights were subordinate. Abortion and Roe redefined the constitutional order for a significant percentage of the population.
Today, when abortion advocates and others on the left accuse the GOP of “taking away women’s rights” through judicial appointments and state laws banning or restricting abortion, they’re not entirely wrong. In 2022, when the Court overturned Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, it did, in fact, expunge from the record a fundamental constitutional right. That this “right” was illegitimate and didn’t belong on the record in the first place was—and still is—irrelevant to them. They were conditioned by Roe to believe that they had a right to full autonomy over their own bodies, regardless of the harm that autonomy might do to anyone else. This is precisely why the reaction to Dobbs has predominantly been moral outrage. They believe they have had their rights diminished, and they believe that rational, legalistic counterarguments express insufficient indignation at this injustice.
A few weeks ago, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey signed the Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act, which made abortion up to birth legal in the state. Conservatives online were horrified at the picture of the signing ceremony, in which Healey and her women supporters were all smiling and applauding. This, the commenters said, was ghoulish at the very least. How could anyone smile at the legalization of killing a nearly full-term child? That’s a fair sentiment from the pro-life side, of course, but it misses the point being celebrated by the other side. To them, it was a celebration of the restoration of their fundamental rights, a reinstatement of civil liberties that had been taken from them.
All of this—the politicization of everything, the de-politicization of abortion rights by Roe, the elimination of fundamental rights by Republicans, and the hope of the restoration of those rights—plays into the Lindsay Clancy ordeal as well.
To be clear, no one in or around the Clancy trial has suggested that infanticide should be legal or that Lindsay Clancy was simply exercising her constitutional rights. Nevertheless, that doctrinaire, rights-based infrastructure that undergirds the Left’s post-Roe constitutional framework did not and could not remain delimited to the abortion context. Because of Roe, several generations of girls have been raised to believe that a woman’s independence and mental health constitutionally override any dependent’s claim on her. It is hardly unexpected that they would reach for that same framework when a new yet unrelated cause places a woman’s interests side by side with her dependent’s death.
In other words, Roe conditioned a broader impulse, one in which a woman’s autonomy and psychological state are the primary moral variables by which her decisions must be judged. The life of her “dependent”—a fetus, not a child—constitutes a secondary consideration.
The Clancy case provides a genuine, real-world instance of that impulse extending beyond the confines of the abortion debate. “Believe her,” Lindsay’s supporters demand. “She needed help, after all.” To them, her suffering and her alleged mistreatment at the hands of the men in her life focus the moral failings in the case on them, rather than on her. They express little or no concern about Callan, Dawson, and Cora. They do not see them as independent people whose lives were ended. Rather, they see her children as bit players in her drama. This is very much the context and framing of the abortion debate.
In the end, the real issue here is that the lives of three children have been almost entirely devalued. In part, because of the profound and enduring impact of Roe on our culture, Callan, Dawson, and Cora Clancy are all but forgotten by their mother’s supporters. Regardless of one’s beliefs about abortion, this is callous and ugly at the very least. The Burger Court did real damage to the nation in 1973, damage that will not be undone easily.
Photo: Plymouth, MA - August 20: Supporters of Lindsay Clancy gather outside of Plymouth Superior Court on August 20, 2026. (Photo by John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
Stephen Soukup is the Director of The Political Forum Institute and the author of The Dictatorship of Woke Capital (Encounter, 2021, 2023)
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/09/07/lindsay-clancy-roe-and-the-lefts-constitutional-order/
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