The declaration of a mistrial in the filicide case of Lindsay Clancy coincides, for me uncomfortably, with a new UK reissue of my 2003 breakout novel We Need to Talk About Kevin. The book concerns a mother whose son becomes a high-school mass murderer. She agonises over whether something has always been wrong with him or something is wrong with him because something is wrong with her. Prior to publication, I’d imagined that the commercial hook would be the frequency with which self-pitying adolescents were taking their misery out on their classmates and teachers, since when I wrote the novel school shootings had yet to be fictionalised.

Instead, what hit a cultural nerve was ‘maternal ambivalence’. The text dares to explore parenthood in de-romanticised terms. It gives mothers permission to admit that they sometimes find caring for small children dull, that the unqualified devotion to offspring we expect from mothers is not necessarily innate or automatic, and that even normally loving parents sometimes dislike their own children. At publication, opening a more honest conversation about the reality of bringing up baby seemed like a good thing. Now I’m not so sure. Given what passes for feminism these days, I feel guilty.

Let’s give no credence to fanciful internet claims that the husband did it just because the husband always did it. The grisly facts of the Clancy case are not in dispute. Having sent her husband on an errand to get him out of the house in January 2023, Lindsay took her three children, aged five, three and eight months, to the basement and strangled them with exercise bands one by one. She killed two outright; the youngest would prove brain dead. She then cut her own wrists and neck.

The seriousness of her suicide attempt is debatable – the cuts were shallow – although jumping from a first-floor window did paralyse her from the waist down. Her husband returned home to the kind of horror it took me 400 pages to build up to.

Plausibly, having to live forever after with the enormity of such a crime seems sufficient punishment – although jurisprudentially that would mean releasing any lawbreaker who feels bad.

The defence argued that Lindsay was in the grip of postpartum psychosis, thus not criminally responsible. And frankly, the whole business of mental illness and criminality is an unsettled mess. Maybe any woman capable of that atrocity is insane by definition.

I always roll my eyes at films in which characters are mortally smothered with a pillow in ten seconds – because, for fatal results, Lindsay must have cut off the airway of each child for four to five minutes. That’s an incomprehensibly long time to watch your own children die. Surely such a killer had to be mad.

Yet this circular reasoning could delegitimise the entire justice system. We could submit with the same circularity that people who violate the moral codes of their culture are insufficiently socialised and therefore evolutionarily defective; if their psyches are damaged or broken, bad behaviour is not their fault. In fact, the whole left-wing trend is to place the locus of control outside the offender. Not the culprit but racism did it. An abusive childhood did it. A history of sexual violence did it. That’s a mechanical, soulless model of personhood – human as inert object, without agency, merely acted upon – and to competent novelists, anathema.

The argument over how deranged you need be to no longer exercise moral free will may be insoluble. What alarms me more is that the conversation I helped start has moved on. If the pink-clad boosters outside that Massachusetts courthouse are any guide, we’re no longer discussing maternal ‘ambivalence’ but maternal depravity. Online and off, women have identified with Lindsay Clancy, joining a veritable chorus to proclaim that the murderer in that basement ‘could have been me!’. Clancy’s family’s GoFundMe campaign has raised more than $1 million. Missing from protestors’ posters is any concern for the fate of the children.

The Clancy fan club insists their heroine was neglected by a medical establishment that fails to take postpartum mental illness seriously. Yet Lindsay sought help from multiple therapists, outpatient programmes, ERs and doctors. They issued her 30 prescriptions for 13 potent drugs. Her problem wasn’t lack of healthcare but too much of it.

The impression her sympathisers leave is that bearing children is intolerable. That motherhood is an affliction. Women have videoed themselves screaming hysterically at their own young kids, posting the clips proudly on social media as if to say: ‘See? This is what the grotesque imposition of raising another generation drives us to. Lindsay’s crazy? We’re all crazy! We totally understand strangling your own kids because we’re tempted to do the same thing every single day.’ Obviously, such performances aren’t doing wonders for the hard-won popular belief that women are capable of rationality and self-control. Maybe we should never have been given the vote after all. Maybe a female president really would press the button when she’s having her period – right after murdering the first family’s kids.

I chose not to have children. That was probably the right decision for me, but being ‘child-free’ is no claim to fame. Rather, my unsuitability to motherhood betrays a deficient generosity of spirit. I’m grateful to my own parents for sacrificing on my behalf. I wasn’t always fun to have around, either –but I hope I’ve redeemed their efforts now that my temper tantrums are down to three or four a year.

If women collectively repudiate pregnancy and its subsequent stresses as unreasonable burdens levied by ‘the patriarchy’, our species will vanish. Purportedly ‘very invested’ in the Clancy case, while Lindsay’s jury was in deliber-ations, Corie Walsh of suburban Illinois allegedly hanged her two-year-old son from the rafters before attempting suicide earlier this month. (Walsh’s lawyer claims she was ‘experiencing a psychotic episode’.)

Behold the kind of copycatting we get when progressive icons include a fentanyl-addicted petty criminal, a cold-blooded assassin who shot a father of two in the back, and, yes, a deeply disturbed mother who choked her three children to death. Is this why we encourage having role models?

Lionel Shriver, The Spectator