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The Lindsay Clancy Case Exposes Big Pro-Life’s Woke ‘Second Victim’ Lie

The second-victim narrative offers absolution without confession, forgiveness without repentance, and empathy without judgment.

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Three children are dead at Lindsay Clancy’s hand, yet a rotten culture has rallied to make her the central victim. That reflex exposes a deep connection between Big Pro-Life, feminism, and wokeness. We cannot establish justice until we confront it.

Big Pro-Life insists that a mother who intentionally kills her preborn child is abortion’s “second victim,” not a morally responsible agent. The response to Lindsay Clancy carries that same presumption outside the womb: The mother is centered as victim, and accountability is recast as cruelty.

Hundreds of women have rallied in pink to support her. More than 31,000 donors have given more than $1 million to offset her parents’ costs of standing beside her. Three children are dead at their mother’s hand, yet she has become the central object of public sympathy, solidarity, and financial support.

Whether Clancy lacked criminal responsibility because of genuine mental incapacity must be judged according to evidence and due process. The scandal is that the culture answered that question in her favor before the jury could, directing its emotional energy toward her rather than her three dead children.

Big Pro-Life cannot wash its hands of this spectacle. For decades, it has preached the same moral grammar now displayed outside that courtroom: When a mother murders her child, center her suffering, relocate agency onto doctors, drugs, systems, or circumstances, and treat accountability as another act of cruelty against her.

The Clancy response is not an aberration from the second-victim doctrine, but that doctrine logically extended from preborn children to born children.

The essentially woke character of the second-victim argument is now evident. It imports the hierarchy of intersectionality into the abortion debate: The more firmly someone is placed within a preferred victim class, the less moral agency and culpability she is permitted to possess. Her commission of the act becomes the very basis for treating her as a higher-order victim.

The Feminism at the Heart of Big Pro-Life

This is not an abolitionist caricature. National Right to Life declares that “the pro-life movement recognizes the mother as a second victim in every abortion” and expressly grounds its opposition to punishment or prosecution in that doctrine.

The problem runs deeper than political strategy. Big Pro-Life’s governing commitments are fundamentally secular and feminist, not biblical or according to nature.

Scripture and nature present women as image-bearers endowed with moral agency, mothers bound to protect their children, and persons answerable under the same law as men. Big Pro-Life instead begins with feminist anthropology: The woman is the presumptive victim, guilt is translated into trauma, sin into circumstance, repentance into healing, and accountability into oppression.

It borrows the Christian language of........

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