TGIF: Once Postpartum, Always Postpartum

Hello, and welcome back to our weekly news roundup. One announcement: The Free Press Book Club is thriving! It’s the hottest space in town. And it’s not too late to sign up for email updates here, or join 3,500+ other Free Pressers already reading and discussing East of Eden in the forum. Also: We have some job listings at the bottom of the column, for superfans only. Now, let’s get to the fresh hell of our summer doldrums.

→ Lindsay Clancy jury deadlocked: I know the Lindsay Clancy trial is not technically the most consequential story of the week, but in my circles (moms) it is The Only Conversation, so bear with me. The jurors are deadlocked. Twice they have gone to the judge to say the jury cannot come to a decision. If they cannot reach a verdict, the judge could declare a mistrial. There are some clues as to what may be happening. For example, at least three of the female jurors were spotted curiously wearing pink, the color worn by Clancy supporters who think she is the victim of pharmacology and maternal stress and believe that—after a stint in a healthcare facility where she will be declared no longer a danger, which, by the way she has already been declared—she should go free. The deeper idea being proposed here seems to be that moms should kind of be able to kill their kids. Like, if they’re really, really stressed. In Canada, that’s the law already. If a parent kills a kid under the age of 1, it’s a maximum five-year sentence. We’re now going to see a movement to bring that to the U.S., and also to expand it to older kids. Death cults will death cult.

Here’s the CBC this week. They called up criminal law expert Isabel Grant, a professor at the University of British Columbia, to say how this is a perfect example of how the infanticide law should expand to older kids.

Technically, in Canada, Clancy could have raised infanticide as a defense for the murder of Callan, who was eight months old, said Grant, the criminal law professor at UBC. But the killing of Clancy’s older children could not be defended as infanticide even if she hadn’t recovered from the birth of the youngest child when she killed them, she added. “That is a shortcoming in the Canadian law.”

A shortcoming in the law, says the law professor, is that a mom might be in jail longer than five years if she kills a bunch of kindergartners since the postpartum might not carry over to each killing. Maybe postpartum should last until the kid’s 18, right? Maybe moms—if they’re under a lot of pressure and like, super, super stressed and changing Zoloft dosages and can’t figure out the Snoo—should be able to kill her offspring at any age? It’s pro-choice taken to the nth degree. My moderate take on “pro-choice until the second trimester” will soon be seen as the radical right position. New battle lines: Are you pro-choice till 1, 5, or 18 years old? The new moderate is saying you draw the line at a 5-year-old. A psychologist will be like, after 5, the children have too many neurons and are, in fact, not fair game.

On Thursday afternoon the jury were again sent home without having reached a verdict. The judge reminded the jurors about the definition of reasonable doubt. Clancy’s defense attorney blamed a single juror he said was holding things up, saying “there’s one juror that refuses to listen to the law.” Oh, Clancy is definitely walking free after all this.

→ Trump coin going live: We have a president obsessed with cash and shiny things, which is probably why you can now buy a roll of Trump coins.

There’s something off about the design. Something odd. Bulwark editor Catherine Rampell put it best: “I like that this design appears to show the birth date of liberty as 1776, and its death as 2026.” Yes, that’s it.

My personal favorite part is that the government is so dysfunctional that the webpage to learn about the coin kept getting overwhelmed. Someone call in the Airbnb guy to fix this!

When was the last time you saw a notice like this? Anytime you encounter a government product, it’s 2004. Just let me buy my Trump coins, okay.gov? I need them to convert into FreedomBucks so I can transfer them to my $LIBERTY.fi wallet to pay for a meeting in the Oval Office.