My female friends and I abide by an unwritten rule when one of us is expecting or nursing a baby: don’t pass along the tragic stories — children dying, parents dying, anything horrible that befalls a family.
Mothers are wired to protect their young. The physiological and psychological changes of pregnancy produce a kind of sixth sense for danger, along with intense emotional responses to perceived threats. Avoiding the news is the first step to slowing those internal revolutions. It’s also nearly impossible to do in 2026.
Since welcoming a baby in January, I have not followed the news as closely as before. But as I nurse my now 8-month-old, three stories keep surfacing. I have come to think of them as one story.
I think of Callan Clancy, who was 8 months old when he and his two siblings allegedly died at their mother’s hands. His death has been categorized as “altruistic filicide,” when a parent believes a child is better off dead than left behind. Lindsay Clancy’s trial ended last month in a mistrial; the jury deadlocked 11-1 in favor of finding her not criminally responsible.
I have been thinking of Anne Hathaway, 43, who is expecting her third child. That news sent a four-year-old clip back around the internet, in which she told the hosts of “The View” that in her experience, abortion “can be another word for ‘mercy.’ ”
“We know that no two pregnancies are alike,” she said. “No two lives are alike … when you allow for choice, you allow for flexibility.” This was not a moral conversation about abortion, she insisted, but a practical one about women’s rights and “the freedom we all need to choose and build our lives.”
A third story resurfaced from Canada, where Dr. Louis Roy, testifying in 2022 on behalf of the Quebec College of Physicians, said “medical assistance in dying,” what used to be termed “mercy killing,” could be appropriate care for babies under a year old born with severe malformations and syndromes that leave little prospect of survival.
The federal minister for disability inclusion called the suggestion shocking and unacceptable. But being shocked is not much of a defense, and the college has not withdrawn the recommendation.
In each of these stories, mercy means the removal of the sufferer rather than closeness to the one who suffers. In each, a life that costs someone too much is a life that can be extinguished.
That is why I can’t look away even as I try not to look. I will have to narrate this world to my children.
I do not want my daughter or sons to believe that children are incompatible with their dreams, or that a child who arrives unexpectedly cannot be received by adults who rearrange their own lives to make room for him.
Unfortunately, Western society has largely accepted the premise that children are modular, added or subtracted as the plan requires, and that if a mother can’t raise a child herself, no one else should.
It sustains a fertility market in which babies are custom-ordered, and surrogacy contracts are drafted so that a woman can be forced to abort the child she carries if the child falls short of the intended parents’ expectations. It’s a feature of the abortion industry writ large, where many mothers believe abortion to be a better alternative to adoption, which they consider akin to abandonment.
And it has produced assisted-suicide laws in 13 states and the District of Columbia, where death is available alongside palliative care — and cheaper.
None of this means the burdens people carry are imaginary. I have given birth four times and raised my children far from family, in a community where I am still finding my place. I would gladly advocate for less fractured reproductive medicine — healthcare that follows a woman from conception of a child through several years postpartum, takes her plummeting hormones seriously, and meets a mother at the brink with urgency, rather than a pamphlet or a voicemail box to call.
But I keep returning to what one of the Clancy jurors told CBS: the jury understood the case as “a turning point,” something that could “make it better for other women in the future, for other families.”
I wish someone had asked her what, exactly, would be made better. Postpartum care? Mercy for mothers at the edge? Or a legal culture in which killing one’s children becomes something other than a crime?
When my children are old enough to ask what a life is worth when it is not productive, I will tell them about their grandmother.
My mother lived four years with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). At every clinic visit, a neurologist, speech therapist, occupational therapist, counselor, and nutritionist worked with her through each new loss and sent her home with exercises, medications, and small practical hacks to conserve her strength and keep weight on.
Then they prepared her, as gently as they could, for what she would likely lose before the next appointment.
My family used to wonder how they bore it. Most people enter medicine hoping to heal; every one of these patients was dying, most within five years. Yet they were mini-Simons of Cyrene, joyfully helping my parents carry a cross that would have been unbearable if carried alone. They were people who showed her mercy.
One meeting was different. New Jersey had just passed its Medical Aid in Dying for the Terminally Ill Act, and the team was legally obliged to inform my mother that she qualified. They were offering her the exit: from the paralysis to come, from the expense, from the fear of being a burden.
My mother admitted she was afraid of being one. She told me she saw what her care was exacting from my father and from the rest of us.
But she said no. She let us carry her instead. Some might call that her choice, freely made, while others should be free to do otherwise. I call it the last gift she had to give.
Love is exchanged through sacrifice — not the sacrifice of the one who is ill or inconvenient, but of those who choose the one in need over their own time, comfort, and plans.
In the Gospel, Jesus rebukes the Pharisees with a line from Hosea: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” (Matthew 9:13) — a warning against putting rules and rituals ahead of real people. Today the admonition might take on another meaning.
We have perfected a mercy that costs us nothing, that spares us the sight of suffering by removing the sufferer. But the mercy God desires refuses to sacrifice the most dependent to the idol of a burden-free life.
The juror was right. We have reached a turning point, just not the one she meant. A society decides, eventually, what it will do with the people who cost it the most. Mothers have a unique capacity to make room for others. I pray that we who have been given that responsibility bear its hardships with joy, perseverance, and hope for better days — and that we find people willing to help us along the way.
