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Canada’s state broadcaster recently published an article on Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother accused of strangling her three children, ages 5, 3, and 8 months. In its Sept. 1 article, CBC News does not ask how a just and humane society should treat the killing of children. It gives the dead almost none of the moral weight normally due to victims of a horrific crime.
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Instead, CBC highlights how differently the case would proceed if the killings had happened in Canada and the trial were heard here. The headline says it all: “How different would Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial look if it happened in Canada?”
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Why so different? Because Canada has an infanticide law and the U.S. does not. Section 233 of the Criminal Code states that if a mother kills her newly born child — defined as less than one year of age — while her mind is “disturbed” because she has not “fully recovered from the effects of giving birth” or because “of the effect of lactation,” she commits “infanticide.” While infanticide is still a criminal offence, the penalty is far less severe than murder or manslaughter — a maximum of five years in prison.
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The law was enacted in 1948, largely to spare mothers from a murder conviction and the death penalty then attached to it that often made juries unwilling to convict. This law has its critics. In 2016, the Alberta Crown asked the Supreme Court to tighten the law, arguing that what was first created to save vulnerable women from the death penalty has become a “blanket” excuse for mothers who kill their newborns, “regardless of their true moral blameworthiness.” The Supreme Court declined to raise the threshold and upheld a broad, low bar for a “disturbed” mind.
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What’s alarming about the CBC article is not that it quotes an expert who outlines how the Clancy case would have been treated differently in Canada, but that the expert names what she regards as the real problem: Clancy’s two older children were past their first birthday, so the lesser charge of infanticide would not apply.
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“That is a shortcoming in the Canadian law,” said University of British Columbia law professor Isabel Grant.
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Read that again. Three children are dead. And what does our state broadcaster do? It platforms the idea that the problem from a Canadian perspective is not the killings: it’s that Canadian law would not reduce the charge for a mother killing her two older children. The implication is staggering.
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With this declaration, the Canadian public has been subtly introduced to a horrifying idea that, if taken up, would inflict injustices on young human lives.
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The perverse idea is simply this: mothers who kill their older children — even five-year-olds, who run, laugh, and talk — should receive reduced culpability.
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Such a morally inverted proposal can only be made today because of a process of dehumanization of the child that has rapidly taken place since the 1960s.