Two mothers' court battles and the case for reproductive justice

Lindsay Clancy, the American mother who is on trial after her children were found murdered and she seemingly confessed to having committed the harm, has, over the past two weeks, generated extensive conversation over the limits of mental illness. More philosophically, in the past week, the ongoing case has forced a difficult question into the centre of public consciousness: What happens when a woman becomes dangerously unwell because of childbirth, and what responsibility does society have to intervene before illness becomes a catastrophe? Clancy is accused of killing her three children, aged five, three and eight months, in January 2023 before attempting to take her own life. Her defence does not dispute that she caused their deaths but instead argues that she was experiencing postpartum psychosis and was therefore not criminally responsible for her actions.

This horrifying case presents those with a conscience with the reality that two things can be true at once: Three children died in an unspeakable tragedy at the hands of their mother, and the woman accused of killing them may have been profoundly ill and therefore acted without rational malice. Holding those truths together is difficult because our public discourse has little patience for complexity when the person at the centre of a tragedy is a woman, and especially a mother. We are accustomed to imagining motherhood as the ultimate expression of female virtue, with women being expected to endure pregnancy, birth, sleeplessness, hormonal upheaval, breastfeeding, physical recovery and the relentless demands of infant care with gratitude. In our individualist, modern societies, when a woman cannot do this happily, she is frequently treated as deficient, rather than being provided with the support that she needs. When she becomes mentally unwell, the failure becomes hers, and should that illness produce tragic consequences, compassion becomes almost impossible.

Contrast this with the similarly ongoing case surrounding McKenna West, a surrogate who refused a request from the contractually intended parents to terminate a pregnancy after the foetus was diagnosed with a life-threatening condition. West ultimately gave birth in August after the dispute became the subject of a legal battle, choosing to flee to Texas, where abortion is illegal, to allow her to keep the pregnancy to full term. In this case, the debate has been framed, predictably, as one where the intended parents’ wishes should have been respected, as West was, after all, just a vessel for carrying the foetus, with no say so on the matter. In both cases, the first where it is argued that the children deserved to live, and the mother’s health does not matter, and the second where it is argued that the surrogate’s bodily autonomy does not matter and the foetus should have been terminated on demand, it is clear that what we care about are not the children themselves, but the policing of women’s bodies.

The Clancy trial and the West debacle provide a ripe opportunity for society to shift its discourse from advocating for reproductive rights into advocating for reproductive justice. Reproductive health asks whether women can access appropriate medical services, seeming not to consider what each circumstantial case would require. By contrast, reproductive justice asks what social, economic and political conditions are necessary for people to experience or opt out of reproduction safely, with dignity, autonomy and support. For Clancy, a justice-centred approach would focus not only on whether she was legally insane at the precise moment she killed her children. We should also be asking what happened in the months before that moment, what warning signs were visible, what care she received or had access to, as well as how the system failed her and brought her to this point. For West, the conversation is much more nuanced, as a justice-centred approach would not allow for the contractual renting of women’s wombs for pay, as it creates power imbalances based on financial disparities. More often than not, women of higher economic backgrounds enter into surrogate agreements with women desperate for money, presenting such situations as the one that West has found herself in.

We also cannot ignore the misogyny embedded in public discourse in the two cases. Insanity as a plea defence has existed within criminal law for centuries precisely because legal systems have long recognised that human beings can become so mentally incapacitated that punishment is not an adequate response to their actions. Yet every time an insanity defence is raised, the public often responds as though acknowledging mental illness is equivalent to excusing murder. This is particularly intense when the defendant is a mother, and the victims are children. The understandable horror of the crime becomes a reason to reject the possibility that the perpetrator was profoundly unwell. We would rather imagine a monstrous woman than confront the vulnerability of women.

By the same token, it would be unconscionable to imagine widespread agreement that a person’s body be under the complete command of another who has rented it, and yet we seem to be quite okay with the concept of surrogacy, even to the point of acquiescing that a surrogate be forced to perform acts upon her body that she is not willing to. These two contrasting cases can only exist in a society which deeply hates and dehumanises its women. Even as we examine our reproductive health options, we must be honest with ourselves about the unrealistic standards that we hold women to, while remaining compassionate for all the innocent children involved in these cases.