At the time of Yates’s acquittal, one Wall Street Journal headline read: “The Newest Feminist Icon: A Killer Mom”. And this, it seems, gets to the heart of the national response to both mothers, with much of the public’s morbid fascination stemming from the violation of the mother-child bond. It is the bond that a child depends on most, and is often described as a relationship of unconditional love. It is celebrated across cultures and religions to the point that breaching it is thought to be unnatural. Indeed, the WSJ writer described Yates’s behavior as “not a mere variant of maternal behavior” — but as “nature’s aberration”.

Would nature agree? From an evolutionary perspective (and others), few relationships matter more than that between parent and child. Children are the primary means by which we pass on our genes, and so our psychology has evolved to prioritize this relationship. That is why infanticide by mothers and fathers is rare throughout the animal kingdom, even though infanticide itself is not (male gorillas and lions for instance kill infants that aren’t their own). ​​Among the great apes, our closest living relatives, maternal infanticide is close to unheard of. Yet among humans, it has been documented with quite striking regularity.

Kim Hill and Magdalena Hurtado open their 1996 ethnography of the Aché, a Paraguayan hunter-gatherer group, with a story told to them several times. A jaguar is stalking a group of Aché hunters through the forest. When the hunters return to camp, they notice that one of their number is missing. The lost hunter’s 17-year-old wife starts sobbing; she is heavily pregnant with his child. A week later the baby is born. “No woman volunteered to cradle the baby… no man stepped forward to cut the umbilical cord,” Hill and Hurtado wrote. “The signs were clear, and it took only Kuchingi’s verbal suggestion to settle the point. ‘Bury the child,’ he said, ‘it is defective, it has no hair. Besides, it has no father’.” An old woman silently digs a hole. The child is placed in it and covered with red soil. A few minutes later the Aché have packed up and moved on.

The Aché are not an isolated case: hundreds of examples of parental infanticide exist, written down in ethnographies of hunter gatherers or traditional farming populations spanning from the 1800s to the late 1900s. Among the !Kung of the Kalahari, abandonment has been estimated at about one in 100 live births. Among the pre-missionized Eipo of highland New Guinea, it was reported at exceptionally high levels; almost 41% of live babies born were abandoned, and they were overwhelmingly girls.

The reason for infanticide tends to be similar wherever you look: parents believe they cannot care for the child. Infanticide often occurs, for instance, when a mother is still breastfeeding an older infant and cannot support another. Another recurring occasion for infanticide is the birth of twins. Ethnographers working with the Mbuti of the Congo rainforest reported that “no woman would feed a child at each breast”. If twins were born one would be taken away and buried. Diamond Jenness, an anthropologist working with the Copper Inuit, wondered about the origin of one woman’s name — “almost two”. Could she have been a twin? Jenness had never encountered twins during his time there. When he asked a local man, Hikhik, the reply was matter-of-fact: “Little man, there is room only for one baby in the mother’s hood. So the other one has to go. Sometimes one is adopted, but the spirits don’t like that.”

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Sex often enters into the calculation. Female infanticide and neglect recur in societies where sons are valued more. India and China are obvious contemporary examples. In 2020, there were an estimated 45.8 million “missing women” in India and 72.3 million in China: women who would have been alive in the absence of prenatal sex selection and excess female mortality, such as that caused by infanticide or neglect. This happens in many traditional societies too. Ethnographers have documented higher rates of female infanticide in many other traditional societies beyond the Eipo. One reason often given is that it is boys who will look after parents when they are old, whereas daughters marry into other households.

In all these cases, these are evidently not decisions taken easily and are events that no woman wants to recall. Most ethnographers tiptoe around the subject, broaching it indirectly by asking people if they know about others that it has happened to.

Nor is this a uniquely human calculation. Though parental infanticide is rare in the animal kingdom, examples of it do exist. Take white storks. When a parent judges that it cannot raise its whole brood — because food is short, or a chick is weak — they may kill the weakest, or toss it from the nest, usually within the first few days or weeks after hatching. Then there’s the blue-footed booby, a large seabird that lays its eggs a number of days apart so that the first chick to hatch has a permanent size advantage over its younger siblings. In periods of scarcity, the elder chick pecks the younger one to death or drags it from the nest, while the parents watch on without intervening. There are even a handful of exceptions to the primate rule. Tamarin mothers, for instance, abandon their offspring. They don’t pick them up when they fall to the ground and have also been seen forcing clinging infants off their backs.

Together these examples tell us something about how maternal psychology works. Natural selection did not equip us with an unconditional drive to protect every child at all costs. It conditioned us to balance that drive against our perceived environmental constraints. That sensitivity evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in a world of real scarcity that has only very recently changed.

What links the breeding systems of white storks, blue-footed boobys, tamarins, and humans? The answer is that, in each case, a mother does not usually raise her young alone. Monogamous birds depend on a father who incubates and feeds alongside the mother. Tamarins are cooperative breeders, meaning they are reliant not just on fathers but also on older siblings and other group members to carry and feed their infants. The likelihood that a tamarin mother abandons her infant rises when she already has multiple young and is short on helpers.

Humans are cooperative breeders too. We have always depended on others to help raise our children, and it is precisely this that allows a human mother to raise several dependent children at once. This is something a chimpanzee mother cannot do: she has to raise her children by herself, and so she will space out her births so that each infant is independent before the next one arrives.

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In species where a mother can raise her offspring single-handedly, as most great apes can, infanticide by mothers is almost never observed. Where she cannot, her commitment to any one infant becomes contingent on whether that help arrives. The anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Hrdy calls it “cooperative breeding’s dark side”: the very system that gave humans their deep instinct for cooperation and altruism is double-edged, with higher rates of child abandonment and infanticide as its corollary.

And while infanticide has grown increasingly rare in high-income countries, where most of the old dangers of motherhood and raising children have been softened, it has not vanished. In England and Wales, between 2014 and 2025, an average of 26 children under the age of 16 were killed by their parents each year.

It should go without saying that this does not mean that parents who kill their children in modern Britain are making a rational response to hardship. Nor does any of this imply that these decisions are consciously calculated. It suggests only why human psychology might contain a capacity for parental commitment to weaken in response to certain cues like hardship or too many competing dependents. In a modern society with a welfare state, those cues no longer mean that a child should not survive, but our evolved psychology does not know that.

The risk is also usually concentrated in the very youngest. When Daly and Wilson looked at Canadian data from 1974-1983, they found that children killed by their parents tended to be extremely young — most were not even a year old. In the ethnographic accounts of infanticide, babies are often killed within days of birth, and very rarely alongside other children. There is a cruel logic to this: if infanticide is, at root, a grim answer to the question of whether a parent can afford to invest in a child, then the decision is made quickly, before much has been invested, and often to protect the children a parent already has, who would otherwise go without.

This is partly why the Clancy case is so unusual. Her three children — Cora, five, Dawson, three, and Callan, eight months — were young, but two had long passed infancy, and all suffered the same fate. This was not anything resembling the cold evolutionary arithmetic of investment. It was a total collapse of the machinery that produces maternal devotion.

The period following childbirth does, however, carry an elevated risk of mental illness. And that risk has long been recognized in law. In England and Wales, the Infanticide Act 1938 charges a woman who kills her child before its first birthday with infanticide rather than murder where childbirth has disturbed the “balance of her mind”. The offense is punished as manslaughter, avoiding murder’s mandatory life sentence and gives judges the option of psychiatric treatment rather than prison. Canada has a similar offense, carrying a maximum sentence of five years.

Evolutionary theory could tell us something about postpartum depression. One account, proposed by Ed Hagen, treats it as a response to raising a child without sufficient help. Withdrawal may reduce a mother’s investment while signaling to partners and relatives that more help is needed.

A related mismatch theory emphasizes the gap between the environment in which human maternal psychology evolved and the one in which many women now give birth. We evolved within networks of helpers, yet contemporary mothers often find themselves alone with their children for much of the day. Falling fertility rates compound the problem: many first-time mothers now have little experience of caring for babies before they have their own. This might explain why rates of postpartum depression are rising. In England, one estimate shows symptoms rising from 10.3% in 2014 to 23.9% in 2020. A sample from California saw a similar rise from 9.4% in 2010 to 19% in 2021.

But postpartum depression is not just a disease of modernity. Among the Shuar, a population of small-scale farmers in Ecuador, Clark Barrett found that of the 21 women interviewed, seven of them reported having postpartum sadness. This type of sadness was well known by women in the community and described as a prolonged state that might last weeks or months. Their own explanations often involved a lack of support, such as an absent husband, or poor health following a difficult birth.

However postpartum psychosis, which Clancy claims she was suffering from, is different. It is far rarer, affecting around one or two women in every 1,000 births. It can involve mania or delusions and is associated with bipolar disorder. It is a psychiatric emergency, not an extreme form of depression.

Whether Clancy was suffering from it remains disputed. Her defense said she was obeying a voice telling her to kill her children and then herself, and was on a cocktail of drugs; prosecution experts questioned whether her symptoms fit our understanding of psychosis. No theory of maternal investment or postpartum depression can settle that disagreement. Her situation was not one of a woman abandoned to cope alone. She had a husband and family around her. She repeatedly sought medical help and admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital. Even so, multiple individuals failed to recognize what was happening to her. She was let down, her husband was let down, and so most of all were her children.

What Clancy did has little precedent in nature. The writer in The Wall Street Journal was right when she described the “Killer Mom” as “not a mere variant of maternal behavior”. And though evolutionary theory cannot shine much light on the Clancy case, it can tell us something more general. Human motherhood did not evolve as a solitary undertaking. Our unusual dependence on grandparents, siblings, and neighbors made it possible to raise several dependent children at once. It also left mothers acutely sensitive to the absence of support. If this sorry affair spurs greater research and channels more resources into protecting women and their children during these incredibly vulnerable periods, then that can only be a good thing.

Officer Garner has been placed on administrative leave while an investigation takes place, but the court of public opinion has already handed down its judgment. Its medium of choice: GoFundMe, the fundraising platform which has in many ways become the purest expression of direct democracy. The tragic tale of HeeHaw has sparked online outrage on a scale reminiscent of some of America’s recent human police-brutality scandals; it is hard not to be appalled by the apparently senseless assassination of a small and harmless donkey. Israel’s fund, which set a target of $30,000 to care for Elsberry Riding and Farm’s other animals and set up a “HeeHaw Foundation”, has at the time of writing raised $155,000. Among the named donors are “Justice for Heehaw Solana”, an apparently California-based campaign collective which has made 14 contributions amounting to more than $75,000 and whose profile picture is a drawing of the donkey in heaven, complete with a halo. Another, who stumped up $5, has set their username to “Trenton Garner is a coward”. Many of the donors have sent hundreds of dollars. The page’s main image is of the dead donkey, eyes glassy, a distraught Hannah leaning over his body. 

GoFundMe, which was set up in San Diego by two tech founders in 2010, has raised more than $30 billion so far for a multitude of causes. Anybody can set up a fundraiser, which has a target attached and is shared across social-media sites for friends and strangers to donate to. More than 150 million people have donated over the years. The causes are as richly varied as pots for weddings and funerals, cancer treatment, boob jobs, sex-change surgery, rent and helping Chelsea Manning pay court fines during the Assange trial. Whatever the story, the language is often identical: the deserving subject is portrayed as a weeping contestant backstage at the X-Factor auditions, pitifully relating their life’s hardships. Subconsciously or otherwise, they repackage their plea as an eminently shareable focus for sympathy, a flurry of vulnerability and gratitude with smiling or teary pics attached. Queasy though it may be, this approach has a cash value. 

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The stakes are sometimes comically low — unbelievably, some shameless people ask for money so they can go on holiday without even bothering with a sob story; sometimes, though, they could not be greater. Many of the site’s most famous appeals have served as political statements. In 2015 GoFundMe pulled a crowdfunder for Sweet Cakes by Melissa, an Oregon bakery which refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple. Conversely, after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida in 2016, the platform waived all transaction fees and donated $100,000 to the fundraiser for victims and their families. The site is ostensibly a neutral platform for universal kindliness — but the causes it promotes or pulls reveals the handprints of gatekeeping just behind the curtain. In some cases, the appeals it hosts have national or global significance; just one week after George Floyd was killed in May 2020, his brother’s fund to cover a memorial and legal fees had raised $7 million. By the time it closed, it had made $14.5 million. Since 2022, a fund called Stand with Ukraine set up by the married actors Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher has raised more than $37 million. 

Then there are the swindlers. The site has hosted fictitious stories several times over the years. In 2017, AP reported the heartwarming story of a homeless veteran in New Jersey who, after lending a woman his last 20 bucks, received $400,000 when her GoFundMe page to “pay it forward” went viral. Kate McClure and her boyfriend Mark D’Amico, who masterminded the scheme, were sued by the homeless man, Johnny Bobbitt, when they pocketed and splurged most of the money. It turned out the trio had made up the story  — and all three were convicted of theft by deception. Police found texts sent by McClure which read: “I had to make something up to make people feel bad.” The site has an investigations unit, and will police fraud when prompted — but this is not a charity doling out grants; it is a platform for financial transactions between strangers. 

GoFundMe has become an unlikely organ through which the public can intervene, in real time, in tragedies, scandals and amusing or moving stories. While official institutions like the police and the courts take years to grind out justice, crowdfunding provides instant satisfaction. In a sense, donations function like votes. In a time of mass disaffection with politics and politicians, GoFundMe gives people an unprecedented sense of control, a way of making their solidarity, sympathy or horror known. News cycles may seem increasingly senseless and frightening — think of those boy-racer crashes last month, which injured a family in Ireland and killed two police officers in Middlesbrough. Inquests in both cases could involve years of feet-shuffling; crowdfunders for the victims in both cases have now raised €750,000 and £1 million respectively. These donations have an immediate purpose — to help the wronged — but they also work as decrees. They say “I believe you”; “we are on the good side”; “I am repulsed too”.

Take the case of Lindsay Clancy. The torrid trial over her killing of her three children — an act her lawyers do not dispute, but claim she was not criminally responsible for on grounds of mental ill-health — may have collapsed, but on GoFundMe the emotional verdict has already been announced. A fundraiser for her parents is illustrated by a drawing of Clancy in her wheelchair surrounded by hundreds of women holding hands in solidarity. So far more than $1.2 million has been raised to “give [Mike and Paula Musgrove] back some of the financial stability they have lost” supporting their daughter’s court battle.

Brandee Mulligan, herself a mother of three who vlogs on TikTok and who set up the appeal, wrote on the site: “This fundraiser is not asking anyone to agree on Lindsay, her case, or what the outcome of her trial should be.” But of course it is a referendum on Clancy’s case. The debate over her postpartum psychosis has riven America and the world along sex lines; a look through this appeal’s list of donors suggests almost all (who are not anonymous) are women. The site only allows you to comment if you give; those who have are not bashful about their support for Clancy.

The Clancy case is a particularly extreme flashpoint — but crowdfunding culture has transformed society in other ways. GoFundMe’s most common cause, making up a third of appeals, is for medical fundraising. In America the site has become an ersatz public-healthcare system, powered not by taxes but by good will. There is, of course, nothing sinister about these campaigns themselves — the success of fundraisers for the thousands of suffering adults and children on the site is a rare perk of the internet. But that people should have to rely on GoFundMe at all — and that they must narrate their struggles to optimize them for virality to do it — is bleak. 

Other causes on the site reveal a particularly despicable quality of the modern internet: the firm conviction that your own problems are others’ responsibility to fix. So it is that the platform is littered with whingeing appeals to “save me from homelessness” or “help me through unemployment” set off by unconvincing tales of persecution by evil housemates or evil bosses. In many cases, the person rattling the begging bowl looks rather like they’re asking others to compensate for their own laziness or irresponsibility. GoFundMe culture has created a sense of victimized entitlement in people who see themselves not as agents in their own futures, but as “causes”, personal brands navigating broken systems. 

At its best, the site is an apparatus for democracy, empowering the public to correct institutional failures or register their disgust. At worst, it teaches us that every grievance has a price tag. I for one look forward to seeing the great works of the HeeHaw Foundation, which if nothing else will provide catharsis; in other matters, though, I remain a skeptic. It seems we live in a world where a single mother’s desire for a BBL warrants mutual aid. In a saner time, you’d get off that flat ass and work for it; today every news story, personal tragedy and vain desire has a “donate” button attached.

I thought of Hogan when I first read about Lindsay Clancy, who leapt from a second-floor window of her Massachusetts home in January 2023. Clancy was not holding her three children; they lay dead or dying in the basement, after their mother had strangled them with exercise bands. Although there are clear similarities between the two cases, my current feelings toward Clancy are very different from those I had toward Hogan. Like many feminists at the time, I struggled to sympathize with him. The “earthquake of insanity” line, in the context of a domestic dispute and a wife who wishes to leave, did not seem to indicate sustained mental illness, but a version of the old provocation defense overwhelmingly relied on by abusive men. By contrast, I find myself feeling enormous pity for Clancy, despite the horror she inflicted on five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson and eight-month-old baby Callan. Her defense claims she was suffering from postpartum psychosis, left undiagnosed in the months leading up to the killings, during which she repeatedly sought help. While this does not lessen the horror of her actions, it suggests a different loss of control — not anger or hatred, but something far more desperate.

I am not alone in feeling this way. Clancy has attracted outpourings of sympathy from mothers ever since the killings took place. By early February 2023, following the announcement that state prosecutors would be pursuing murder charges, many were sharing their own postpartum struggles, some even suggesting that “it could be any one of us”. One open letter signed by more than 80 women declared that “as mothers, we know Lindsay was not in a healthy space to carry out the acts she is accused of and we will stand by her in her darkest hour as we wish any other mother would do for us if we found ourselves struggling too”. Now that the trial is taking place, supporters have gathered outside the courtroom, wearing pink clothing as a show of solidarity and displaying slogans such as “Believe” and “She Needed Help”. A GoFundMe on behalf of Clancy’s parents, to help with their travel and living costs, has now raised more than one million dollars. It is hard to think of a comparable example in which a father has killed his own children and received so much support. Few men would want to say, “I could have been John Hogan, too”.

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While the trial is nominally about the distinction between madness and badness, Clancy’s identity as a mother has shaped the public debate around it. In a 2024 interview with the New Yorker, her ex-husband Patrick described her as someone who loved her children but whose mental state deteriorated dramatically toward the end of 2022. Clancy consulted multiple therapists over her anxiety and insomnia, was prescribed an increasing number of medications, and had a brief stay in a psychiatric hospital at the beginning of 2023. She disclosed her thoughts of harming her children to her family because they so terrified her. At no point was any severe mental illness diagnosed. For many, this timeline offers a ready-made feminist narrative. It is what happens when mothers are ignored, when maternal health is trivialized, and when research into female psychiatric disorders is neglected. It is “fundamentally a story”, writes The New Yorker‘s Jessica Winter, “of who is listened to, who is believed and taken seriously, and who isn’t”. The case of a woman killing her own children has become an argument for greater compassion toward women — rather than serving as a reminder that women can be just as violent as men.

One does not have to doubt Clancy’s account to feel a little uneasy about this conclusion. Postnatal mental health is indeed neglected, and postpartum psychosis is yet to gain formal classification as a distinct disorder. Yet the fact remains that Clancy committed a horrendous act. Is her trial really the place for pink t-shirts and #BelieveHer sloganeering? And is Clancy really the representative that this cause needs? Female support for Clancy has been a gift to anyone wishing to define feminism as hypocritical or present feminists as willing to defend the most evil acts just because a woman has committed them. I myself worry about my own fixation on Clancy’s suffering over that of her children. Could it be that we are all reluctant to acknowledge the extremity of female violence because it is so politically inconvenient? 

Still, I do not feel my pity is entirely misplaced. Many of the recommendations being made by Clancy’s supporters are uncontroversial: more understanding and better treatment of postnatal mental health crises, less pressure on mothers to hide their struggles, more joined-up prescribing of psychiatric medication. Nonetheless, it is not clear whether any of this would have stopped Clancy from killing her children. Her treatment was flawed but, as Patrick Clancy later pointed out, she seemed to be going through a positive phase immediately before the killings, making it impossible for him and others to know when to intervene. This does not seem to be an instance in which one can simply blame the patriarchy. Indeed, to do so risks sanitizing the maternal experience. I think there are other, darker reasons why many mothers feel sympathy for Clancy.

When mothers claim they “could have been Lindsay Clancy”, it is more than just an expression of solidarity. Clancy has become a vessel for a kind of collective maternal fear. Many of us have tried to imagine what it would be like to end up in her situation. In the midst of all the sleeplessness and isolation of early motherhood, the physical power we have over our children feels horrendous and threatening. We care about Lindsay Clancy because she is our very worst nightmare. We pictured ourselves in her shoes before she even committed her terrible act.

Postpartum psychosis is rare, and postpartum psychosis leading to the murder of one’s own children is rarer still. There are countless mentally ill mothers out there who do not kill their children. However, intrusive thoughts of harming one’s baby are common. More than half of new mothers experience them and they are not related to any greater incidence of actual harm. When my own sons were tiny, I lived in terror of “mad moments” in which I might throw them down the stairs or drop them out of a window. The feeling was akin to the thoughts you might have standing on a high ledge, terrified that you might suddenly decide to step off, even though that is the last thing you want to do. The comforting explanation for these thoughts is that they are linked to a desire not to harm but to protect your child. We run through a film reel of the most terrible things that could happen to our children: harm coming through our own hands being the most terrible of all. When we look at Lindsay Clancy, we see the most horrific malfunction of maternal love and feel immense relief that this never happened to us. That is why we feel sorry for her.

Of course, an intrusive thought is not the same as a “command hallucination” or hearing a voice telling you, as Clancy later put it, that “she had to kill her children and herself”. One of the most chilling elements of Clancy’s account of her actions is the sense of time pressure. She felt that she had to act in that moment or “neither she nor her children would be safe”. It is hard not to ask “what if that moment had never come?” She must, surely, think of this constantly.

Clancy’s act is not excusable, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t worthy of our compassion. In the end, however, there are no slogans that can remedy this tragedy and there is no one else to blame. The mind can do terrible, twisted things out of love as well as hate.