Is It Time To Rip The 'Insanity' Fig Leaf From Eve?

Why are women who kill their children treated differently from men who kill their children? There are many cases.

Jeannie DeAngelis | September 29, 2026

Sometimes, Biblical stories, taken as mythical archetypes, are useful to consider.

To consider the Lindsey Clancy murder trial case: 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........

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