This episode examines the Lindsay Clancy case in detail, including why it does not align with postpartum psychosis based on clinical insights from a trauma nurse. It explores historical and cross-cultural patterns of infanticide, legal responses in various societies, and the role of cultural and religious frameworks in shaping attitudes toward child protection. The discussion also covers the mother-baby dyad concept in modern medicine and its potential influence on perceptions of maternal responsibility.

Listeners will gain a deeper understanding of anthropological data on neonaticide and infanticide rates, comparisons across hunter-gatherer groups and historical societies, and proposals for building stronger cultural safeguards. The conversation emphasizes evidence-based analysis while addressing broader societal implications for preventing such tragedies.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins:. Hello, Simone. I know this is gonna be a hard episode to you for you. as our watchers know, we have avoided talking about the topic of the Lindsay child I can’t handle it. Because it emotionally affects my wife so much.

Simone Collins:I can’t log on the Internet. I just want all the kids to be okay.

Malcolm Collins:I recently wanted to go into two parts of this in detail that I haven’t seen other people talk about a lot. And they were brought up by a fan outreach to us because I originally was of the opinion, and I know this is going to piss off our fans, that I thought that it was plausible, perhaps even very likely

Simone Collins:That Lindsay Clancy had postpartum psychosis.

Malcolm Collins:however, I received new, breakdown of the what it’s like when a woman is in that from one of our fans who is a nurse and works regularly with women in postpartum psychosis that convinced me that this was not a case of postpartum psychosis. The second thing that I wanted to explore is why do women kill their babies at such high rates? And this is something that I was unaware of both in terms of our culture and in terms of other cultures. If you look over the course of a child’s entire lifetime, the rates are about equal for husband and and wives. But if you look at infancy, the rates are overwhelming for wives.

Simone Collins:Well, that’s because they’re overwhelmingly around the women and not the dads.

Malcolm Collins:Well, it’s also true if you look at cross cultural infanticide. So, there’s

Simone Collins:Why does that change? The women have the boobs. The there’s been some

Malcolm Collins:studies on this. If you look at, bird cell, estimated systematic infanticide in hunter forager groups, it was at between 1550% depending on the groups.

Simone Collins:Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah.

Malcolm Collins:The rate sits around 41%. If we look at the Aceh in Paraguay, the homicide rate and this is before the age of 10, so they they kill much later, which is unusual, is between ten and fourteen percent. If we look at the and this is one of these things when people talk about, like, uncontacted groups, and we need to preserve their lifestyle.

Simone Collins:Not. No. I’m I’m like, man.

Malcolm Collins:No. Eraticate their lifestyle. What are you talking about?

Simone Collins:It out. End it.

Malcolm Collins:This reminds me of this African story that I had to read in school about, like, how colonialism was so bad. And in it, they talk about leaving one twin always to die in the woods, and and they talk about this is, like, this horrible thing that, like, colonizers were ending this practice. And I was like, what are you talking? Colonize out of these people. Yes. Bend them over a log and colonize this. Because, clearly, they aren’t handling things on their own. Okay?

Speaker 4:It’s the book Things Fall Apart where this is described, which was assigned reading in my school because they thought it made the Christians look bad.

Malcolm Collins:Mhmm. If we look at the Inuit people, this was a a Ramessen 1931. Of the ‘96 births recalled by parents, thirty eight girls were killed. That is forty percent of them. If we look at Australian aboriginal groups in the nineteenth century, this is Kelsaw Yongenden, they put rates at between fifteen and thirty percent. And so I wanna understand why this happens. Why do you get these incredibly high rates of mothers killing their offspring? What does the science say? What do other sources say? And I also sat

Simone Collins:with Wait. Wait. Wait. So what you’re saying basically is, like, without strong cultural or statutory or both guardrails, women just be killing their babies?

Malcolm Collins:In fact, it is so common, and the nurse goes over this, which we’ll get to later in this piece.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Shout out to you, by the way. We, like, really love and respect you, so thanks for running in. In many countries You’re the only reason why we’re doing this, and it’s your fault that I’m not gonna sleep tonight, but I love you anyway.

Malcolm Collins:In many countries outside The United States, it is it is until fairly recently in legal history, it was legal for moms to kill their their kids.

Simone Collins:Well, I mean, she pointed out that even in was it Brazil? Like, the maximum sentence is three years

Speaker 6:So I decided to look up the case of Brazil, and it’s not that the maximum sentence is three years. It’s just that that’s around what mothers often get. For some recent cases, there was the Bella Horizonte case where the baby was left in a dumpster, and this she only got two years and nine months for. Then there was the Baluma case where a baby was stabbed with scissors, and she only got two years, two months, and twenty days.

Malcolm Collins:or some other It was Brazil and Japan and China.

Simone Collins:Very licenses. You did it, and you admitted you did it. Now please serve your three years in jail for kill. And this is, like, one of the worst crimes I could imagine. No. You don’t get three months. This is an innocent child. Like, it’s one thing if, like, oh, you you killed an adult. Like, they had a good run. Okay? But, like, a child, an infant, this

Malcolm Collins:is Well, I mean, Simone, you gotta keep in mind, you talk about other cultures is doing this. As it’s, like, horrifying thing when we know this was common and normalized in ancient Rome until they became Christian.

Simone Collins:Always thought until today that this was, like, men or even, like, external people to the family resting sick, nonviable babies from, you know, screaming mothers who were too weak in their postpartum state to fight back.

Malcolm Collins:No. It’s almost always the mothers. And in fact, it’s even almost always the mothers. So I was reading cross cultural analysis.

Simone Collins:The most cruel and sick thing in the world. Like, the a baby the the only safe place you have is a kid. Like, that’s supposed to be the final safe refuge. I know you killed by that.

Malcolm Collins:So what’s important to note is, when mothers do it, because the, Lindsey Clancy case actually does not match the anthropological record. K. The anthropological record, the normal time to do this is before you start nursing the baby. With the the hormonal chemicals that create the bonding to the infant, that process happens with weaning, and that makes it much harder for the mother to kill the infant. Whereas in many cultures, what happens is they go into the woods. Basically, they have the kid with the other women, and then they, without the husband having any input at all, they get to decide if they wanna keep the baby or not. This is the way that it works in many hunter gatherer societies. Basically, the wife and the other women who are involved in the birthing process.

Simone Collins:No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

Malcolm Collins:And and and in forty percent of cases, they decided they didn’t want them. So I want to no.

Simone Collins:Mean, Maybe we need to rethink this whole prenatalism thing. I don’t think we’re

Malcolm Collins:Not for everyone, Simone. Not for all cultures. And I think that this is something that we’re increasingly understanding.

Simone Collins:Culture until the eighties didn’t give anesthesia to infants they were operating on. They just gave them paralytics.

Malcolm Collins:We’re I understand. And we have to move and create a new techno puritan society that helps everyone else stay in line where I I mean, I I think that’s the only option. Right? But I think what what I wanted to before I go into the Lindsey, Kancy, and the nurse stuff is to highlight for people is I think in our existing culture, both the pro choice and the pro life movement, I think, has trivialized the life of children. And I I don’t wanna say that again. I think the pro life movement has trivialized the life of children. Because if you look cross culturally outside of Christian and Jewish communities, killing babies was historically the norm. We’ve pointed out that, like, in Rome, Tacticus, who were retaining one of our future kids after complained that the Jews didn’t kill babies. He thought it was like a weird vegan thing. He’s like, why why are they doing this? It’s annoying. Right? Like, it’s something every every other society in human history understands that sometimes you just expose babies when it’s they’re inconvenient for you or whatever.

Simone Collins:Maybe we need to rethink that name.

Malcolm Collins:He he was cool in most other respects, and it was from the pre Christian period. Okay? But the I’m getting the angry look for my wife. but to continue here, I wanna go over this argument from the nurse because I found this really compelling. So she said, not sure if this is something you plan to touch at all, but in the discourse around Lindsay Calancey, seems very surface level, and I think there are a lot of things we can glean for both the crime and the reaction at large, especially if we try to look at the historic parallels. I think it might be an interesting episode. One, Lindsay Clancy didn’t have a high psychotic episode. I’ve worked as a trauma surgery nurse since 2009, never as a psych nurse. I saw a sharp rise in psychosis among my patients after Missouri legalized recreational cannabis in 2020. Now quick note here before I go further. She’s just gonna be talking about what she has learned from that. Hallucinogens, I worked in schizophrenia research, which in in schizophrenia, you you develop psychosis. I’ve been published in the field. I am a former neuroscientist and psychologist professionally, not, like, an amateur armchair. A lot of people are unaware of this, but any hallucinogen can dramatically increase the the chance that you have a psychotic break, either in terms of a case like this or in terms of it just happens to you. This is the primary reason I will advise my kids to never ever ever risk marijuana. It is one of the most dangerous drugs you can take for this reason. And when I say one of the most dangerous drugs you can take for this reason, it’s because, while it may have a low chance of killing you, it may have a low chance of OD ing you. as this person is seeing this increase in the the rate of psychosis, you don’t understand if you haven’t worked with people who have schizophrenia how terrifying it is as an illness. Because the thing about schizophrenia is you don’t know if you’re born with the schizophrenia switch or not. Some people have it, some people don’t. Now if you have the schizophrenia switch and you don’t do whatever ends up triggering it, it doesn’t trigger. And if you can make it to, like, the age of 30, it’s unlikely to ever trigger in you for your entire life. You basically made it. You’re gonna live a totally normal life. However, you can be, as one of our patients was, one of the top people in his class at John Hopkins.

Simone Collins:Oh, that you were studying when you were with Yes. Okay.

Malcolm Collins:And then I mean, when we studied him, he was a homeless person. But, he was in his early twenties, one of the top people in his class in John Hopkins. Something flipped the switch in him. I don’t remember if for him it was psychedelics or something else. And then just after that, he’s not able to live a normal life in society anymore. He hears people talking to him all the time. He he he struggles to understand what’s real and what’s not real. He begins to develop intense fears of thing like, being persecuted. It is not a fun life. Living the life of a schizophrenic individual is perhaps what I’m talking about living horrors you wouldn’t wish upon your worst nightmare enemy only second to, Alzheimer’s. And worse than Alzheimer’s

Simone Collins:I don’t know. In Alzheimer’s, you kinda don’t know what’s going on. I mean, it seems like everyone else is being mean

Malcolm Collins:to you or whatever. Right? Worse than Alzheimer’s. Yeah. It it yes. One of the worst fates that can be fall upon in a human. So even though the rate is low with a lot of this stuff, it is increased, and it’s simply not worse the fun that any high is going to give you. because highs are I’m gonna be honest, as somebody who, when I was younger and I didn’t know about this, did a number of different drugs, actually, it’s not that fun. I’m gonna be honest. Like, hallucinogens are kinda boring.

Simone Collins:I thought cannabis was more to help people not care about how bad things suck.

Malcolm Collins:Well, that’s the way some people use it, but it’s still a hallucinogen

Simone Collins:Okay.

Malcolm Collins:To continue here. These folks typically become my patients. By the way, if you’re older, if you’re, like, past 30 and you’re smoking pot, whatever, I don’t really care. These folks typically become my patients by getting shot by the police during psychotic episodes. So they fall into a unique category of committing serious crimes due to psychosis. Typically, a, they initially cooperate with police because they believe the police will help them. They readily admit to their crimes. Yes, officer. I had to set fire to the couch in the lobby because the hotel clerk was trying to sex traffic me to the gas station patrons across the street, and that was the only way I could create a distraction. You have to help me arrest all the people trying to sex traffic me. B, they only resist when the police or people around them fail to go along with the delusion. And note the delusion that she cites here having worked with people who have had psychotic breaks, very normal for a psychotic break. that’s, like, like, almost a a typical psychotic delusion. And and they and they do believe them well, actually, I’ll point this out after her. And then c, the delusions do not resolve on their own. It often takes antipsychotic medication and a lot of time with psychiatrists. And even then, they will often just play along but still believe the underlying false beliefs are true. They just learn to not advertise, and they hold false beliefs. In the case of Brian Spicer, perhaps it’s possible for psychosis to resolve once a triggered substance has been metabolized, but I’ve never seen that in practice. Yeah. That’s that’s the thing that I wanted to note here is hallucinogens don’t trigger the psychotic episode while you’re on the hallucinogens. If they trip it, they can trip it permanently. and and and psychotic episodes don’t happen all at once. They happen in waves, so you’d get one every couple weeks, every couple months, something like that, which, you know, can make it even worse because you you think you’re safe to be around. And then as one of our patients did, saw somebody walking by them on the street was a witch, and he had to kill them. You know? So, like, the this this is why I was uniquely sympathetic to the psychosis argument having seen this in patients before. Right? The the other thing that I wanna note here is this idea of, like, you really struggle to recognize something with a psychotic episode. Like, I remember we had one patient who told us about the day when everything was free. He’s like, wasn’t that so cool a few years ago when you could just, like, go into any store and take anything and, like, everything was free that day? And you now know, I mean, as a sane person, you’re like, oh, so this guy was just, like, just spent a day stealing stuff.

Simone Collins:Wow. You never told me about this before. Yeah. You never told me about, like, your interviews. That’s crazy.

Malcolm Collins:No. Two, her behavior in killing her children was a normal variant of female behavior seen nearly universally across cultures and history. mothers commit nearly all neonaticide killing a big newborn within the first twenty four hours of birth, as I said, before weaning. A 2017 meta analysis states, they found that parents committed one hundred percent of neonatocytes, 0.6 to one hundred percent, 100, if studies only considering parents were examined. 13 countries had data, and the vast majority of neonatocytes are committed by mothers. It was 100% IQR nine two point nine to one hundreds. Fathers commit very few neonatocytes. In this study, it was zero point zero zero percent. IQR, zero point zero two six point seven. child homicide perpetrators worldwide, a systemic review, PMC. According to the same meta analysis, mothers and fathers go on to commit infanticide at similar rates over the course of the first year of life. Other studies found that mothers were more likely to kill children for a longer period of time. The study cases in The United States says that mothers are, the it’s the most likely perpetrator of infanticide for the first week. and this is from, risk factors of homicide in The United States. now the the note that I need to put here, and I think she clarifies this, is the studies that say in the first year of life, men and women have the same rate of killing infants is actually very manipulative because it includes fathers who are not the biological father who have a very high rate of killing infants, and biological fathers have an incredibly low rate of killing infants. If we’re going to talk about why this is the case, it’s largely I mean, at a genetic level because if I, as a man, believe I have found a genetically superior partner or a better partner, then I’m gonna be able to have more kids with and better kids with. I can just leave my wife, and she’ll raise the kids. Or I can take the kids and have a second wife. Or, you know, there’s there’s a lot of options for a man. For a woman who decides that, especially if she doesn’t think she’s gonna be able to raise the kids on her own, she might feel she is better off killing all her children and trying again with another man, in in a in a historic context because a lot of guys aren’t gonna wanna marry a woman who has kids. And, again, Simone, allows us to fire you up. We, one, have to build a better society, and two, that involves a lot of groups and cultures that exist on Earth today not joining us in this future empire.

Simone Collins:Well, they’re not welcome.

Malcolm Collins:They’re not welcome. And I and you too often go into this suicidal empathy of, like, well, but it’s the it’s the young one.

Simone Collins:Not when it’s kids. No. Mm-mm. No. You don’t hurt

Malcolm Collins:them. Simone, that’s what leads to this. The the it’s the suicidal empathy of not dealing with the situation Yeah. That leads to it happening to future generations. but I agree with you around maybe you go some other pathway, gene drives, other things like that to handle this. there there are potential solutions. putting people in pleasure pods and saying, could just live out your life in this. Just no more.

Simone Collins:Which most people prefer, which is great.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. I mean, as we saw from our Muslim afterlife episode, they probably prefer the pleasure

Simone Collins:of God. So Someone created an option. I think even Leaflet had this idea of, okay. What if, like, we just offered 5,000 to anyone, and in exchange, they would have to be permanently sterilized. Like, yeah. Let’s do it. Like, that I’m I’m ready for that now. I’m ready for that now. I only want people who desperately want to have kids for cultural and values aligned reasons. Like, having a kid is the the purpose of their life. I want those people to have kids. I do not want anyone else to have kids. I don’t. And I don’t think they do either. So let’s give them $5,000, and let’s do the leaflet plan. I think it’s great. I remember someone pointed out in, I think in her feed, they were like, well, that would have meant that Simone would have been sterilized. I don’t care. That’s great. I

Malcolm Collins:care. I care. But I don’t think you would have done it.

Simone Collins:Yeah. I probably wouldn’t done would not have done it. But

Malcolm Collins:yeah, man. You’re not a lean on the state for your own sterilization.

Simone Collins:I’m really not. Yeah. I I I yeah.

Malcolm Collins:I I think that would gross you out about it.

Simone Collins:That would absolutely gross me out. I really I didn’t like any sort of state sponsored anything. So

Malcolm Collins:Okay. Then she continues. There is a modern myth that men are more likely to kill their children. The studies used to support the myth put biological fathers and unrelated male adults in the same category, or she went over this, without taking into effect the Cinderella effect. Familia hearts the emotionless styles of 211 killers, Oxford Academy. This is where Katie Frost tells everyone to pause the video and Google the words mother’s boyfriend. If we assume that domestic violence rates among lesbians, shows a hidden pattern of women’s true domestic violence tendencies, I would wager that women are more likely to engage in violence towards their biological children than men. Recent child abuse statistics show mothers acting alone are more likely to abuse children than fathers acting alone. The f f y twenty twenty four data shows eighty nine point one percent of victims are maltreated by one or both parents. The parents could have acted together, acted alone, or acted with up to two people to maltreat the child. The parental categories with the largest percentages are victims maltreated by a mother acting alone, thirty seven percent, victims maltreated by the father acting alone, twenty five percent, and victims maltreated by both parents, nineteen point three percent. Page 43 on child maltreatment, 2024. But this may be an artifact from the higher rates of single mother homes. Speaking of single mother homes, wonder if the rates of white versus black infanticides oh my god. That’s not good. so the rate per a 100,000 children in The United States, for white mothers is one point seven five. For black mothers, it’s six point eleven.

Simone Collins:Oh god. No. But

Malcolm Collins:but but you wanna hear something that is gonna piss off our audience potentially, or the the Catholic part of our audience is probably gonna love this. For Hispanic mothers, it’s only 1.39. So whites do it at a higher rate than Hispanic mothers.

Simone Collins:That makes sense. Because at at least all the Hispanic mothers that we know really, really wanna be mothers.

Speaker 3:What does this say?

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. I actually think you’re right about this. I think it’s the urban monocultural infection of white mothers that makes them dehumanize their infants.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Whereas the the Hispanic mothers, we know they’re they’re less urban monoculture brained, they’re more likely to. You gotta send it out every single word, even the big ones.

Malcolm Collins:Which makes it you know? And, again, this is where I get to people where I’m like, look. Like, the Aztec may have been evil. Right? And the Mayan may have been evil, and the Incan may have been evil. But that doesn’t mean that Hispanic populations might not have some benefit to them that we do not see within white female populations in The United States. Right? And if you look at our community, like, a lot of the people who people go around, like, in our in our social networks, insulting and saying, oh, this person’s a white supremacist or whatever. The the what are the types of wives that they have the most are Hispanic wives? because they’re like, well, you know, white women. Am I right? The point here being is, you know, it’s it’s important to look at these things with nuance. Right? So, recent oh, sorry. To continue here. Three, this behavior has been accepted and condoned nearly universally across cultures and historically. This they these are claims that she’s trying to debunk here. Right? so she goes on to say, traditions around birth in many historic cultures tend to have infanticide built into them. In examining the historic record, I can’t parse out the role of the mother from the community at large in a lot of cases. Asia, Mobaki in Japan and sex selective infanticide in China, Korea, and India. Here’s a passage from an 1892 about how female infanticide was practiced in China. Now you probably do wanna close your ears on this part, So I’m gonna be going through

Simone Collins:You just, like, wave your hands in a panic fashion, and I will put the headphones back in.

Malcolm Collins:Okay. In China, slaughter of girl babies, PMC. In these countries, the courts still tolerate infanticide when committed by mothers. This mother was fined 1,000 rupees or about 15 USD at the time for throwing her newborn off a third story balcony. Court sympathy for unwed mothers who killed their child note that she was held in a prison awaiting trial. and this is a link here that she’s sharing. In Africa, there are documented traditions around infanticide specifically for twins or babies who appeared to be deformed in some way. In some tribes, the mother was killed for giving birth to twins or a baby considered deformed. One example, court lenient or mother conceived of killing a newborn. Europe. Attitudes around infanticide during the Roman Empire were noted by Tacticus. Intolerance for infanticide specifically when committed by the mother persisted in Europe to the modern era. In modern Western countries, infanticide is a crime separate from homicide. Conviction of infanticide decreases the punishment for mothers but not fathers. Infanticide and overview science direct topic. For common law countries, are separate statutes for infanticide. UK Infanticide Act of 1938, Canada section 233 of the Criminal Code of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, section one seventy eight of the Crimes Act 1951, and South Africa. In other Western countries, Germany, France, Scandinavian countries, these crimes were prosecuted using homicide statutes, but applying tradition that grants leniency to mothers who kill their babies. See, this was even in Europe, you saw this. like, America is the only place this didn’t happen. Germany actually repeated its separate infanticide law in 1998 to adapt this strategy. In Italy, throwing a newborn baby into the trash or expiring it to die is not considered a homicide at all. It’s considered abandonment. this was is this still the case in Italy? Oh my god.

Speaker 5:So I went to AI to, you know, double check on this because I was like, this sounds absolutely insane. And, of course, the AI hems and haws about the nuances of the Italian legal code. And then, of course, at the end, it’s like, well and, of course, as recently as 2023, there was a Toronto case where a newborn was left in a dumpster, and They only convicted her of abandonment. And I’m like, wait. As recently as 2023, you could leave a baby in a dumpster and only be charged with abandonment? That’s the Italian legal system for you.

Speaker 15:Note here that AI likes to be very specific, but the baby didn’t end up dying when it was left in the dumpster, and that’s why it’s okay and that the Italian legal system would have treated it differently if it did die. I’m like, bro, two years for leaving a baby in a dumpster? Like, we need to talk about that.

Malcolm Collins:Middle East Muslim world prior to Islam, burying baby girls alive was common practice. Islam prohibits infanticide, but it is still widely practiced and tolerated in countries practicing Sharia law. In Pakistan, babies abandoned to die are not reported, investigated, or counted by government statistics. Ex in the the link to the article talking about this exclusive abandoned babies, police taking cognizance of ghastly crime. Newspaper, dawn.com. Residing incidents of infanticide, neonate, and infanticide in Pakistan. An emerging crisis, science direct. Now I’m gonna put this with the links in the show notes, which is always on Substack, so you guys can look this up if you want. I’m also gonna read something else that Simone won’t wanna hear. So I I wanted to go into the statistics here around instances in which infants or kids were killed at older ages and when this happened. So you have examples of the in Northern Ghana or spirit children. This is disabled, chronically ill, are born during a family disaster. They are said to have come from the bush and destroy the house. Identification can happen well after birth, and they are sometimes killed. The Minga, Kara, Hamar, Bana in Ethiopia, cursed for wrong tooth order, deformity, or illegitimacy, or parents who skipped fertility rights. Killing can occur when the teeth come in, not only at birth. some Amazonian groups, Sakaiya, Sorara, and others, have disability, twins, children of single mothers, also occasional killing of older children. one reported case of a 12 year old buried alive for wanting to be a woman. And I want to note here, this does go against our case if we haven’t found transness in other cultures. Soraya children later judged not to be developing properly are buried alive. Why do they have to kill them in the most gruesome possible way? Barbaria and similar West African cases, which child status can be assigned from birth signs at later development, dentition, etcetera, can can cause this. And if we look at groups like the Ache, where this has been studied more, this is like a precontact group. Fourteen percent of the girl than twenty three percent of the girls were killed before the age of 10.

Simone Collins:I need my I had to cast my earphones awake because I could first kind of hear you through them, and that was very disturbing. Okay. And thank you for removing me from that part of the conversation.

Malcolm Collins:And I will say it has left you with genuine gaps in your knowledge of human history when you’re like, but the Khmer Rouge weren’t really that bad to young people. And I was like, do you remember that I had you cover your ears when I went over that? And you’re like, oh, yeah. Now I remember.

Simone Collins:Okay. So who do I need to hate? just people in the past.

Malcolm Collins:Everyone who’s not a Christian or a Jew Okay. Basically.

Simone Collins:Okay.

Malcolm Collins:Just gonna say, like, they’re different. The basically, what we get is all groups that are not Christian than Jews. Now Muslims are technically not allowed to do it, but, apparently, they do it at really high rates.

Simone Collins:So Christians and Jews. Okay. Everyone else Well, okay. Sorry.

Malcolm Collins:Protestants and Jews. Because, apparently, Catholics do it at really high rates. But by whose measure? The Italian legal systems. That was probably the most horrifying.

Speaker 7:Sorry. I made the mistake of just going off of what this woman said. I decided to look up the other, Catholic majority countries to see if they were potentially even worse than the Italian system. if you look at countries like Poland, a mother who kills her child during the period of birth under the influence of its course shall be subject to imprisonment for only three months to five years. Only three months to five years. Wow. That’s horrifying. In The Philippines, for example, if a mother kills a child in order to cover up dishonor, the range is only four months to six years, and we’ve seen some very light sentences there. So for an example of what this looks like in practice, there was a case in Poland where the mother got ten months for killing a live newborn and then cleaning up the bathroom, hiding the body, and lying to the father. The prosecutor asked for a year, but the court said that that was too harsh. And, again, it’s important to remember that Lindsay Clancy was a Catholic. Right? I think it’s important to note that there is something unique. Like, when you see a pattern, it’s worth calling it out. Like, what why why do we see this pattern? And I think this pattern is downstream of an entire society pretending they believe life begins at conception when a majority of people in that society don’t actually believe it. So then they’re like, well, then also a baby’s not really alive. Right? And then this gets extended to the entire legal system.

Malcolm Collins:Even currently? So, apparently, it is not murder to leave your baby in a trash can in Italy. Okay. Again

Simone Collins:Screw Italy. Screw Italy. Yeah. Italy’s gone. It’s done.

Malcolm Collins:It’s important to remember, as I always say, that Protestants and Jews are much culturally closer to each other, and Catholics and Islam like, technically, in both consults of them in Islam, you’re not supposed to practice exposure, but they both practice like, the countries where they’re from practice it at high rates. Again, look at Brazil like you were talking about where it’s still practiced at high rates. Sweden, look at Italy, look at you know? Okay. it’s not that the rules are different for the groups. It’s just their propensity of following the rules. And people always ask me, like, why do you have it out for, like, Catholics? And it’s like, well, stop leaving your babies in dumpsters. Like, that would maybe, like, help me. Like, again, it’s like a it’s it’s like a why do you view this group this way? And it’s like, because of history and statistics. Like, I I don’t know, like, what I’m supposed to do. Like, I go to one type of country. I go to another type of country. I’m like, this country’s trash. This country seems to have a civilization. Right? Well, not for long with all the immigrants. Right? But you know what I’m talking about here. Right? It’s important to recognize that different people are different. Right? Anyway and and that groups can improve themselves. That’s that’s the other thing I really believe. Right? Like, they both within Islam and in Catholicism, they have rules against this, and they can work to build something that’s less horrific. And and what we also see is that rules around mothers being punished less, while they might be uniquely horrific in countries like Italy, they they still happen in places like Germany and Scandinavia. Not in The United States, mind you. We we are like if you wanna know more all countries

Simone Collins:Well, hold on. I mean, there are still baby drop locations at places like hospitals and fire houses.

Malcolm Collins:They when you when you when you push the baby in the baby drop, it didn’t go into, like, a blender or off a cliff.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Okay.

Malcolm Collins:Okay? It’s somebody who was on the other side to take care of it.

Simone Collins:Yeah. That’s okay. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:That that’s the difference. And the baby drop locations in Italy, they go to a trash compactor. And the baby drop Why did

Simone Collins:you tell me that? Oh, because it they’re dumpsters.

Malcolm Collins:Yes. Oh. Okay. Continue.

Speaker 8:I will note here for full disclosure when the while it is true that leaving the baby in the trash can or dumpster only resulted in the two years, that baby did not die. And in other cases where the baby has died in Italy, you have gotten harsher punishments. That said, you know, you see in other countries like this take France, for example. You have the case of Veronica Quirkatl, who in 2009, she killed three newborns. One, she burned in France, and two, she froze in South Korea while living there. She ended up only serving four years in prison. Then you have Dominic Corterez. 2015, she killed eight newborns, and it hid the bodies. She ended up serving only nine years in prison. Then you have Romana Cantet. This was a a Spanish origin case tried in France where she had five newborns that she either drowned or froze to death, and she only faced eight years in prison. I I will note here that, yeah, outside of Brazil and Latin America, as we’ve noticed, you know, Latin American women being less likely to do this, of the the Catholic populations, Latin America seems to be the one that takes this more seriously than the other ones. Not not the European populations as many people think of, like, the Europeans as the good ones and Latin Americans as, like, less. It’s the exact opposite that we see in in practice. It’s the Europeans that act less civilized and the Latin Americans that act more civilized.

Speaker 13:So the point I’m trying to elucidate here is in America, we sometimes forget how different we are culturally even from many European cultures. and when we freak out about something like this and we’re like, oh my god. This is inhuman. How could this happen? We may not realize that this is because we imported cultures into America that are incompatible with American cultural values when it’s just a normal thing. Oh, you froze a few babies. You burned one alive. Whatever. That’s another Tuesday. go to jail for four years. You know? we’re in America. We’re like, no. This is, a very, very serious thing because we see the world differently than they do.

Simone Collins:The This is not this is I’m not gonna sleep tonight. I’m not gonna sleep tonight. It’s important to remember,

Malcolm Collins:not all cultures are the same, and we should have some resistance about integrating some cultural groups into whatever society we aspire to build.

Simone Collins:I can’t do this. We’re gonna have to burn it all.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. This is the thing, Simone. You need this fire in you so that when we say we have to take care of x or y or z group because they they’re acting in a way that is incompatible with what you want to exist in the future when you’re like, have to let the wasp go. And I’m like, the wasp lives in our house, Simone.

Simone Collins:Then you give a gene drive to the wasp so the wasp can’t wasp more than

Malcolm Collins:know? It in a yes. We’ll try to find The

Simone Collins:wasp lives a happy wasp life and doesn’t sting anyone. I just I just want everyone to be okay. Why is it so freaking hard for humans to not be a******s?

Malcolm Collins:Because not everyone has our cultural values, Simone. Okay. Great. To continue here, the prevailing modern beliefs that Clancy promoted that give cover to maternal filicide, we’re all familiar with the line, my body, my choice. The my mother infant dryad is a concept in modern medicine that continues to describe the infant as part of the mother after birth. In nursing school, this is what I was taught, that babies are not me, but they are also not other. It’s a new third category that exists as a part of the mother. In psychology, Donald Woodcroft famously said, there is no such thing as a baby, meaning that an an infant literally cannot exist or be understood in isolation from maternal care. He preferred to talk about a nursing couple treating, the pair as the basic unit of early life rather than the infant alone. and in psychology, Margaret Moeller’s developmental model described as early symbiotic phase, roughly the first few months of life, where the infant has not yet psychologically differentiated itself from the mother. The infant experiences itself and the mother as fused as if they were a psychological system without a boundary. Moller’s whole framework of separation and individualization is about how the infant gradually moves out of this fused state and develop a separate sense of self. Now I think what’s interesting about this is I don’t disagree that these aren’t healthy concepts to have.

Simone Collins:Well, and I relate to that, which is annoying. Like, I I feel that way with with infants, like, that they’re a part of me. When they hurt, I’m hurt. They are an extension. And and that’s why it’s also so weird and creepy when people are like, can I hold the baby? It’s like someone being like, can I hold your butt? Like, I’d really rather not. Like, it’s very intimate. Like, let’s let’s not.

Malcolm Collins:Like Yeah. I’m gonna keep my baby, and nobody get near my baby, and nobody touch my baby.

Simone Collins:Yeah. It’s like someone being like, can I hold your breast for a while? And it no. I really don’t wanna do this. Oh, in fact,

Malcolm Collins:I think it’s worse because you’re, like, more worried about them hurting it accidentally or something.

Simone Collins:But it’s it’s very much like you feel it the same way you would feel like someone like, if you’re a dude, like someone asking to hold your dick. It’s extremely intimate. If you love the person a lot, maybe you’ll be like, yeah. I’m okay with that. This is a very intimate thing. But Yeah. Of course. You know? But yeah. I I think that’s the problem if you’re a dude. Let let’s just think of it that way. But I I just so it it I I it’s it’s disturbing to hear about this.

Malcolm Collins:Well, then this is being repurposed through the abortion conversation. Right? Well, sort of.

Simone Collins:But you’re you’re missing a little bit of subtext here too. A recent video that that came out of Lindsay Clancy earlier in her life and career, I guess speaking on behalf of a hospital’s maternity ward, was talking about their new hospital setup, which the same listener to Basecamp in front of ours has talked about being, you know, kinda messed up. This thing where the baby is always in the room with the mother and even to the to the point where the mother just cannot sleep sometimes. It just, like, wants a break and will kind of shame you for, like, asking for them to maybe take the baby to the nursery for a second so you can sleep for a moment. Because they’re like, well, it promotes breastfeeding. And you this it’s like this really big breastfeeding propaganda thing of, like, you have to do it. You know, you have to always be with the baby. And, you know, sometimes mothers need to

Malcolm Collins:Which is total BS, by the way.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Anyway, so she she brought that up to us maybe even a year ago. And here is Lindsay Clancy being, I guess, a face of this for the hospital she was working at at the time being like, in our rooms, do this. And it’s it’s better for the mother. It’s it’s really not necessarily better

Malcolm Collins:for the mother. It’s about saving money. They don’t wanna do the the the nursery.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Exactly. I I do think it’s a money saving thing. I think she mentioned that too. But yeah. So that that’s that’s something she is very, very aware of and has a lot of experience with. And then lo and behold, here’s Lindsey Clancy actively talking about it, which also shows that she herself has been a part of this, you could say, propaganda wing in postpartum care where it’s like, you know, combined and, you know, this whole thing. And it’s it’s it’s scary to see things go from that, basically, as suboptimal for mother’s hospital policy, which she bought into or at least was a a mouthpiece for evolving into an ideology that this person is now this listener to Basecamp is now arguing has contributed to women thinking, well, look. I can commit I can harm my baby because it’s just self harm, and I’m allowed to commit self harm. Like, that’s it’s so sick. It’s so sick.

Malcolm Collins:It it is it is a logical what what I’m gonna argue at the end of this, and and we’ll go into, you know, what are the chances that she was actually trying to end her own life, is we’ll look at cases where mothers do kill their infants at later stages because I think we need an explanation.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Her youngest was, like, eight eight months or something. Like, not not newborn. Definitely not

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. Well, you could just say, like, women are evil, but I don’t like that explanation. I don’t think that’s a helpful explanation.

Simone Collins:It’s not.

Malcolm Collins:I think

Simone Collins:we need an We can’t do something with that.

Malcolm Collins:Explanation as to why she did this. Right? Yeah. Other than just one day she decided to become evil. And that’s why I like the psychosis explanation originally. So if we bust the psychosis explanation, I need another explanation.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Because also it’s I just I can’t understand it. I can’t under because also, like, if you’re just evil look. Pregnancy is hard. Even if you have a smooth perfectly smooth pregnancy, it is not comfortable, and it is not easy. And Yeah. You don’t go through three pregnancies. Three of those and then then decide to to do and, also, I mean, unless you’re really screwed up, I I don’t think I don’t imagine that killing people is pleasant. Just doesn’t all of this

Malcolm Collins:argue that what we’re seeing here is it appears now to me that she really did think she was gonna kill herself and that she was doing a category of infant killing that is not uncommon when a mother decides to commit suicide, which is you decide to kill all your kids first. And it’s it’s called, like, you think you’re doing it for, like, positive reasons or whatever. And I think that if she did it for that reason, like, that’s even worse. That is not psychosis. That is something that

Simone Collins:It’s murder suicide. It’s murder

Malcolm Collins:suicide, which which makes it, like, way worse. Like, when you hear some trans kid goes and kills his mom and dad and then kills himself, you’re not like, well, it’s okay because he killed himself afterwards. You’re like, woah, dude. Like, what why do you get to decide to do that? Right? And I think it’s this internalization of the kid is being part of the mother. And the question

Simone Collins:is First off, in terms of crimes, I think a kid killing their their parents is way morally lower on my, like, list of horrible things than a parent killing a child. That child has no ability to defend themselves. They played no role, in my opinion, in, like, hurting the parent.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. This is where I think we need to go back to, like and we’re like, okay. We gotta have Aztec punishments, like, flaying someone or something like that. This is where

Simone Collins:I think that makes sense. No. I don’t I I fully disagree with you on that. It’s it’s like the portal song. I used to want you dead. Now I only want you gone. They just need to not be here. They just need to not be here. No amount of pain or punishment is going to change that. The research is clear. Like, scary punishments are not a deterrent.

Malcolm Collins:The moon is crazy. So

Simone Collins:They just the only thing that matters is that they are not present. That’s all. Understand. Don’t wait. Torture and pain, that is just you going like, getting down to their level and being an animal worse than an animal.

Malcolm Collins:No. No. No. I I understand exactly. So in the far future, when a when an AI based on Simone is running a spaceship, and, occasionally, people are just gonna disappear out airlocks or something.

Simone Collins:And Simone No. They’ll just vaporize. They will just vaporize. Yeah. I don’t remember that. Painlessly, there will be no because, also, like, dying out of airlock is is a incredibly painful and short experience. No. You will you will just not be there. Okay. Rapture. It’s just gone. It just You’re just gonna Theranos. Not Theranos. Thanos.

Malcolm Collins:Do we have to be, like, walking along and somebody’s just gonna, like, disintegrate? And next time,

Simone Collins:Obviously. It’s And you’re gonna like the only correct way.

Malcolm Collins:You don’t remember them. Right? We wouldn’t want you to

Simone Collins:disintegrate too. It would be fine for people to understand why people are no longer there, and they should understand why people are no longer there. But there is no benefit societally or morally for there to be additional suffering and harm on top of suffering and harm. The point is what makes us human is that we are capable of rising above that. There are two directions that homo sapiens can take with our prefrontal cortex. Either we can use the additional capacity of feeling, suffering, pain, and joy, and also massive intelligence and agency to do unspeakably worse things that animals can do. Or we can get rid of all of the violent and horrific tendencies that animals had because we don’t need those in order to survive and rise above. And I only want to be a part of a society that rises above, and I will remove everyone who’s incapable of that, period.

Malcolm Collins:Let’s I and this is where as much as I really like the Knox, you know, the as a content creator and everything like that, he always goes into this, like, thou shall not kill. When it’s thou shall not murder. And in in regards to, like, when somebody is an active threat to society and other people and has done horrific acts like this, like, these are instances in which yeah. Like, this needs to

Simone Collins:be hit. But when he says when he’s referring to that, he’s obviously he’s obviously referring to thou shalt not murder because the the bible, the Old Testament, especially, is full of clear prescriptions on when people should be destroyed. Yeah. Well, no. I I

Malcolm Collins:think some Christians and some Jews go at this from the perspective of they they really mean it. Like, they’re they’re trying to, like, signal something to other people about, like, how extreme they are when they don’t actually think through, like when you take killing off the table, one, you you move to an anti biblical position. Yeah. And and and two, like, I think we’re in a society where for a lot of things, we need to be much harsher in the way that we handle specific punishments and much harsher in the way that we deal with things. And that means, one, like, in regards to the prison system and that significantly reduce a lot of these practices we have around, like, the death penalty to make it cheaper and easier to enforce. Because Yeah.

Simone Collins:But, also, I’m so glad we’re bringing back firing squads because that is genuinely more humane.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. I agree. Where where where is that happening?

Simone Collins:I can’t remember which state. Think it’s, like, Tennessee. Which state brought back firing. Yeah. There we go. Autocomplete already. Everyone’s interested. Idaho. Go Idaho. Oh, also several other states have it as a backup method when lethal injection is unavailable. I wonder if he can request it. I would request firing squad all the way. South Carolina, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Utah. Alright. Alright. Make it happen in Pennsylvania.

Malcolm Collins:Make it happen in Pennsylvania? Well, when we take over, we’ll move to an all firing squad justice system.

Simone Collins:Well, no. I mean, obviously, I would build better tech in general, but I I think right now, firing squad is best.

Malcolm Collins:To continue here, the partnership for maternal newborn and child health, PNMC, hosted by the WHO, published a piece explicitly titled the mother baby dryad, why an integrated approach to maternal and newborn health in research and practice is essential for progress, in which there is an emphasis on considering the dryad in evaluating outcomes, not the individual mother or baby. The baby friendly hospital initiative, I’ve mentioned the BHMI on calls before, pushes the dryad understanding of postpartum care. I hate the b h BFHI. It’s budget cut, and thinly veiled as a quality improvement initiative.

Simone Collins:Okay. So that there she

Malcolm Collins:has points to get promoting it. Right? This is the the one that you were talking about.

Simone Collins:Just like we were saying. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:I think the modern idea that babies are extensions of the mother during infancy explains at least part of why women are so tolerant of Clancy’s crime. I can see somebody who has bought into the BHMI propaganda, like Clancy obviously obviously had being less likely to see her children as fully human. I think this framing provides a modern excuse for women to do what they’ve always done and kill their babies. The maternal tendency to commit infanticide predates the dryad theory, but it seems to be part of the permission structure we use to excuse why this type of murder is okay. I think there are very different permission structures in different cultures and historical eras that have been lost to history. The real question here that deserves to be considered is about how society perceives and treats motherhood, exploring how motherhood was understood in the past, specifically in Jewish and early Christian culture, and rituals within those cultures developed to protect infants from their homicidal mothers. And note here, a woman is writing all of this to another woman. Keep in mind how sane when people are like, oh, women are crazy and evil. Base camp women aren’t crazy and evil. We have a lot of awesome women in our community who talk with my wife and not with me. This woman has never reached out to me.

Simone Collins:She reached out to us. What are you talking about?

Malcolm Collins:Well, yeah, but she talks with you.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Sometimes, but, like, you’re excluded. You’re not thrown out of the longhouse.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. The new longhouse, the base camp longhouse, the ruthless longhouse. Right? The the policing other women. Oh my god. The three women who tried to get this one guy, apparently, they there was just one guy who wouldn’t quit on the jury. Right?

Simone Collins:He like, I’m glad he didn’t either.

Malcolm Collins:And they were like, wouldn’t do it just because of the brutal way she murdered her children. And it’s like and there was Are you listening to yourself? Three haggard, horrible looking women who apparently yelled at him so much people could hear them through walls. If you’re like, this guy’s gonna have PTSD from this. But now the trial goes back to trial because it ended in a mistrial. So she doesn’t she doesn’t get off automatically, and we gotta see what happened. The real questions here that there to be considered about how society perceives and treat motherhood and exploring motherhood as understood in the past, specifically in Jewish and early Christian culture and rituals, which this culture has developed to protect infants from their homicidal mothers. Jewish and Christian cultures seem to have successfully stigmatized infanticide, and I think rituals around childbirth helped to prevent infanticide. The practice of church women in Christian cultures after childbirth, was derived from Jewish traditions and closely followed the time frame that it takes for a woman’s hormones to return to pre pregnancy levels. Most women have an increased sense of well-being when estrogen is highest. Immediately after childhood, estrogen crashes from the highest levels normally experienced by women to almost nothing, which is why women commonly experience baby blues. It takes about six weeks for estrogen to return to normal or non breastfeeding women of the woman to acclimate to this new normal if breastfeeding. HCG is also completely cleared six weeks postpartum. And here, she goes over, like, a a a timeline of how this happens, which you guys don’t care about, but it is essentially explaining this. She then says churching women takes place around forty days after birth, same time frame in the Jewish tradition. I think this ritual serves to mark the end of the psychological postpartum impression and signal to the woman that the community that she has spiritually returned to normal, which makes a lot of sense when you consider hormonal fluctuation. What the heck is churching women? Sorry. I’m gonna hell. To continue here. Presenting the child to the community. In Judaism, this takes place on the eighth day after birth and involves announcing the name of the child. In Christianity, this is done at baptism. So the timeline varies based on the church. In the Catholic tradition, the baptism includes an exorcism prayer that the priest leads the parents in in front of the community. And after reading so much about infanticide, seems like a good idea. Having traditions around naming children, acknowledging them as a person, them from you and created by god and presenting them to your religious community seems like it would be a relatively protective of the child. and now I wanna get into her argument as to why this isn’t true, which I found really powerful. My argument is that, basically, the mothers killing their children seems to be an evolved trait that societies worldwide tolerate and excuse. Of course, most of the jurors wanted to acquit Clancy. This is how most humans respond when a mother kills children. Somehow, most societies seem to have evolved to be uniquely tolerant of this form of murder or so I, don’t understand how anyone was surprised by any of this. I think the My Body, My Choice is very problematic when paired with mother baby dryad theory, which Clancy had to adapt because of her hospital’s policy. It’s the dominant policy in The United States. Not sure about outside of The United States. But I don’t think it leads to infanticide. I think it just helps individuals rationalize the behavior where they’re already going to tolerate, condone, justify. So justify, yes, but fuel other cultures without this framework tolerate infanticide. It’s just a convenient way in women in the less to conceptualize this behavior as morally ambiguous. I do think that this particular justification underpins a lot of the current discourse, but all of this ignores the fact that human societies largely tolerate this behavior from others. In order to argue that infanticide is morally wrong, the in the modern American context, I think you have to engage with the my body, my choice narrative. Now one of the arguments she made here gosh. And I don’t remember reading it. Do you remember me re reading this? Because I found it really powerful when I first read her make it, is that she didn’t think that it was postpartum psychosis because in postpartum psychosis, everyone is always like, oh, I no. Sorry. In in normal psychosis No.

Simone Collins:No. But she she said that someone who is postpartum psychosis per her experience would never ask for a lawyer, which is what Lindsay Clancy did apparently immediately right after murdering her kids because per her experiencing people with postpartum psychosis. They’re like, they they don’t trust anyone. Everyone’s out to get them. Why on earth would they think that a lawyer

Malcolm Collins:would believe Well, not just that, but but they think until everyone’s out to get them, everyone would believe them if they just heard them. Right? Like, of course, I had to kill my kids. It was it was the the of course, I had to light the couch. Of course, I had to kill the witch who was walking by me. Don’t you know she was a witch? Yeah.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Which is that is that is pretty compelling. And that’s what convinced me. Well, I don’t yeah. I don’t I don’t know the whole the whole story of, like, how she was found or anything. I because I I can’t I can’t engage with this. But

Malcolm Collins:Anyway, to to finish here, I started really looking into this after, learning about the Dickinson case and learning that the maximum sentence for infanticide in South Africa is three years.

Simone Collins:Oh, South Africa, not Brazil. Okay.

Malcolm Collins:Sorry. Tolerance for women who kill their babies is a pattern that can’t be unseen, and I’ve tried for so many years to understand where it comes from to no avail. Clancy is just one of the countless data points that falls in line with this trend. If this is part of human nature, my goal would be to understand it and then be able to better participate when, where, and how it occurs and how to build cultures and societies that are better in resistance to these primal instincts. And I’m gonna give my thoughts on how you build a society that’s more resistant to this. And I’m gonna move apart from the beginning to here to better explain this, but the point I would like to make Octavian, what do you want?

Speaker 3:I want you to help me find a coat for this.

Simone Collins:Not right now. Tell him it’s in the bucket hanging from the coat rack in the kitchen.

Malcolm Collins:It’s in the bucket hanging from the coat rack.

Speaker 3:Okay.

Simone Collins:I have the answers.

Malcolm Collins:You’re such a good mom. So good. I’d imagine you probably wouldn’t kill our children.

Simone Collins:Who knows at this point?

Malcolm Collins:So we need to think in terms of tranches. Right? Like, first, it is good if you have prohibitions on killing your children. Like, that’s, you know, number one thing, right, in terms of lowering the rate that people kill their children. And that already puts you in a a pretty low bucket. Right? Like, it’s Jewish and Christians Jewish, Christian, Muslim societies. Right? And then we need to ask, okay. But then why is it that Jews and Protestants seem to do this at lower rates than Muslims and Catholics? and the answer here in terms of, like, at a societal level, the answer here that I would come to is, I actually think it comes down to the way that, you know, some people talk about, like, life beginning at conception when they obviously don’t mean that. As I’ve talked about before, you know, you have a tank well, I’ll put the bit I had at the beginning here But in terms of the the the point I’m making here is when you go out there and you tell society that because we see this in our comments sometimes. We’re like, look at the mass murder that’s happening in The United States. We’re just like the Aztecs, you know, murdering a four year old or something like that when when, you know, a woman takes plan b or something. And it’s like even the people who believe life begins at conception, if you said pull the power cord on a tank of, you know, 500 blastocyst, you know, recently for a mineralized eggs, or take this knife and stab this five year old to death. nobody’s gonna choose the five year old. Right? And it’s because we understand that even if you think that there is something really meaningful that’s being destroyed, if a a a blastocyst is not allowed to become an embryo. Or in in worst cases, I think where you’d get a lot closer to stabbing a five year old is, you know, when you have a a second trimester baby, a third trimester baby, which you have in some states. But when you equivalent all of this to the same thing, you allow the other side to then be like, well, everybody knows a blastocyst. It’s okay to kill a blastocyst, right, or it’s not that big a deal. From their perspective, keep in mind, I’m I’m I’m pointing out, but this can seem intuitive to a lot of people, and was apparently intuitive that you can kill infants to most societies throughout human history. Therefore, I can discount when these people say I shouldn’t be killing infants. And when you see this this reaction to the Lindsey Fancy child, women getting so excited about this that they are doing copycat killings, which happened recently, that they are chasing jury members to try to dox them and ending up potentially as twenty years in jail, this one woman, that they are camping out and living outside of the courtrooms. Right? That they’re making their lives about this on TikTok. The pro life movement has moved the argument to such an absurd position, certain parts of the pro life movement, that it has allowed a community of women who have these pre Christian, pre Jewish a mother has the right to kill an infant post birth beliefs to reemerge. And and I know that we wanna blame this. And I and I do say saying, oh, you can just discard, you know, blastocyst, embryo, developing baby. That’s this horrifying thing and that that makes it okay for women to discard a baby post birth. I think that that’s part of what’s playing out here, but I think we need to take ownership on both sides to and and, obviously, the ownership is an equal. I’m not saying that, but we need to be more realistic in the way that we’re making these arguments when we compare, for example, American society to the Aztecs, which happened under the comment in the Aztec video. and I think that some people really believe that this is an effective argument point instead of realizing that what it does is end up dehumanizing already born infants.

Speaker 10:And I understand that this would be very uncomfortable for many conservatives if it’s true, but if the data that we’re looking at appears to track, which is not only was Lindsay Kansley a Catholic, but in Catholic majority countries, we see this behavior at higher rates. We’re gonna go into this in just a second, and we see it punished less. Then that would make it seem like these beliefs do seem to correlate with a dehumanization of already born infants.

Speaker 12:And to make this even more uncomfortable because you could be like, well, these countries are secular now, so this doesn’t really count. Actually, the laws allowing mothers to kill newborn infants have been significantly restricted recently in countries like Spain and France, and in parts of Latin America, where when the countries in the past were more Catholic, they were actually much looser about killing infants. Whereas now that they’ve become more secular, they’ve become significantly less looser loose about it. so it appears to be specifically tied to the religiosity. And to sort of sum up because I’ve tried to explain my thoughts on this. If you tell everyone in a society that we’re gonna collectively lie and say we believe something that no one at least emotionally really believes, that a blastocyst is the equivalent of stabbing a five year old child to death, or leaving a baby in a dumpster is the same as taking plan b. People will say, well, like, intellectually, I believe this, but I don’t think anybody really truly this emotionally sits as true with him. And because of that, they begin to normalize. They say, okay. I am okay feeling the same way I do about terminating a blastocyst as I do about leaving a baby in a dumpster or stabbing an infant to death, or burning an infant alive, which has happened in in France. So and I think that that normalization is what creates this psychological license within certain populations And here on the screen here, just to sort of hammer this whole point home, I’m putting when I say, I don’t think they really believe this, the rate that Catholics do abortions against other groups that don’t believe life begins at conception, and you you can see it’s equivalent rates even when you take into account how frequently they attend church.

Speaker 14:Or to word it another way, when you are able to convince yourself that the life of a newborn or one year old child is equivalent to the life of a blastocyst, within some people that elevates the life of the blastocyst. But it seems from the data that we have access to within most people that decreases the value of the life of the newborn.

Speaker 16:And it’s important to remember when we talk about importing other cultures to America, this trial wasn’t just held anywhere. It was held in Massachusetts, the second most Catholic state in Um, it was and and and we saw it being carried out in a way that looks similar to the way similar cases have gone in Catholic majority parts of Europe. And that’s what’s shocking to us, that we’re beginning to see other cultures influence the American legal system.

Malcolm Collins:. But to expand on what I mean by by this particular segment, because I I do think it’s really important, is there was an episode where we looked at Catholic rates of stuff like doing abortions and stuff like this when contrasted with other Christian faiths that didn’t think that this was murder. And we saw very small levels of differences even when you correct for Catholics that are going to church very, very frequently. So even when you correct for levels of religiosity. so the question is is why do Catholics and Muslims not follow the rules that they say they believe at the same rate as other groups? And I think it’s because they even in the way that they practice their tradition, show that they don’t really take the rules that seriously and that rules are very flexible and are more understood as, like, a broad story and something that you socially front instead of, like, super strict rules. So an example of this is around idolatry. Right? so, like, in Islam, they’ll say, oh, we’re so strict against idolatry. You know, look at the the we’ll kill you if you draw a picture of Muhammad. And then you go into a mosque, and it’s covered in gold and gemstones and and and all the fanciest things you could ever have, or you go to a rich Muslim’s house, and, oh my god, you’ll never see anything so opulent in your entire life. It’s like idolatry incarnate. And it’s because they carved out the narrowest definition of idolatry that they could focus on and then, you know, ignored everything else. or I think that this is the very same instinct when somebody said a blastocyst just killing a blastocyst is the moral equivalent to stabbing a child to death. Right? When I don’t think anybody seriously believes this, but it’s like this this this thing that they’ve been taught to argue. And when you’re taught to argue something that you don’t actually believe, when push comes to shove and you actually make the choice at, like, a societal level, you end up making these negative choices at much higher rates. and so I think that the the best way around this is to say it it well, it’s to basically learn to argue honestly. Right? and and so when the people in the comments because it was a fairly upvoted comment saying that the America is the moral equivalent to the Aztec torture someone to death everyday empire for having lots of abortions. I’m like, I don’t I don’t think you believe that really truly. I don’t think that anybody really truly believes that. But I think that when you teach yourself to act as you believe that Mhmm. When a when a moral decision actually comes to the shove because you’ve got so used to lying about what you actually believe about morality and reality, you find it very easily to fudge on these particular decisions. And that’s why I think it’s really good to like, if if you’re building something with your family, you can say something like, you know, in the eyes of god is equivalent. Like, even if you’re gonna hold this this position. But, you know, with like, to a society, it may not be the same. But, again, I I I think that a lot of this stuff is really I I guess where I am is is I think because I did decide to do more research on her to see if the suicide thing people are like, well, the cuts really weren’t that deep. You know? But it does appear that she dove headfirst out a window where the fractures were. Right? And some people are like, well, she lowered herself out a window. Yeah. Maybe. But if I was lowering myself out a window not intending to kill myself, I wouldn’t do it head first. Because if I was a nurse, I could understand, especially on frozen ground, that could kill me. And I just need an explanation as to why she decided to do this.

Simone Collins:Is that how she allegedly

Speaker 3:More of the more I need help finding cords because my because the battery for my Game Boy is totally dead.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, and how did that happen?

Speaker 3:I can’t find the charging cord.

Simone Collins:Octavian, did you go to the coat rack in the kitchen where the large bucket is hanging and take the bucket down and look inside?

Speaker 3:I thought I used to sit in up here. Dad?

Malcolm Collins:No. Bucket that appear.

Simone Collins:In the coat rack in the kitchen. Okay. Yeah? Okay. So Octavian. Yeah. I got

Malcolm Collins:a question for you. Yes. Come here. Breathe. This is a because I think people would wanna know. Like, what’s your moral intuition around this? Suppose a mommy killed her kids and her baby. What do you think should happen to the mommy?

Speaker 3:She would die.

Malcolm Collins:How would she die?

Speaker 3:Because she murdered her own kids daddy made, and that’s the law.

Malcolm Collins:Yep.

Speaker 3:No killing

Simone Collins:That’s the

Malcolm Collins:law. What about other people’s kids? Could I kill somebody else’s kids?

Speaker 3:No. That would also put you in doll because then you will be murderers and murderers gets in the jail.

Malcolm Collins:But it’s especially bad when you kill your own kids. Right?

Speaker 3:Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:That’s, like, the worst thing you can do. And but wait. Stop, Octavian. Don’t don’t spaz. Why explain why. Like, morally, why do you think it’s bad to kill a kid?

Speaker 3:So if if this if if you make a kid, it’s bad because you put so much work into making that kid. So if you killed it, you would be wasting, like, a million dollars.

Simone Collins:Wasted work? That’s your thing? Wasted work?

Speaker 3:Not just that.

Malcolm Collins:What about the potential of the kid? Right? Like, the kid had his whole life to do great things, and somebody took that from him. What would do you think that that’s a a bigger reason than the wasted money?

Speaker 3:Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:Okay. And how do you think the mom should be killed?

Speaker 3:What mom?

Malcolm Collins:What the mom if a mom killed her kids, how how should she be killed?

Speaker 3:Oh, she should mostly be mostly I think maybe sometimes I don’t know. Maybe their moms won’t die or maybe their moms sorta. I don’t know. Maybe the way for a mom to die if he kills the kid is just

Malcolm Collins:Old age?

Speaker 3:Police shooter.

Malcolm Collins:Old age? Like, she should be put

Simone Collins:in prison? He said have the police shoot him.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, have the police shoot them? Okay.

Speaker 3:Yeah. And then put her in graves.

Malcolm Collins:Okay. And bury her. Well, I think you have a strong moral intuition, Octavian. And I think that you you’re a really good kid, and you’re very lucky because I don’t think your mommy would ever hurt you. Would she?

Speaker 3:Yeah. Because I was her first kid.

Simone Collins:Oh, so I would like her

Malcolm Collins:What about the other kids?

Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, she wakes all of us.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, okay. But what about daddy?

Speaker 3:Yes. Daddy.

Malcolm Collins:So daddy might kill you?

Speaker 3:No. Daddy will.

Simone Collins:So you feel safe, buddy.

Speaker 3:I’m gonna explode my hand out of you if you say that, though.

Simone Collins:Okay. One more time. I won’t. I love you. You can go remember, bucket. It’s it’s the bucket where your,

Malcolm Collins:like,

Simone Collins:helmet is hanging, you know, on that coat rack. It’s that big metal bucket.

Malcolm Collins:It’s full

Simone Collins:of all the stuff.

Malcolm Collins:And I am so excited for you to get a little older so you can say even more of your moral intuitions because I think they’re really valuable to people.

Speaker 3:It’s bad.

Malcolm Collins:Alright. Go.

Simone Collins:Okay. So, Malcolm, you’re saying what did

Malcolm Collins:he make it up okay? My read is that she genuinely because, again, I think you need an explanation for this.

Simone Collins:I thought you need to the only way you know you’re gonna die by jumping out a window is most likely is if it’s a

Malcolm Collins:sixth story window. Well, there there are signs that when she was, like, slitting her wrists and stuff like this that she hesitated, that it appears that she had some trepidation about doing this, that she didn’t have when she was doing it to the kids. So, you know, I I I to me, that does increase some moral culpability she had. That she had trouble taking her own life, but not her kid’s life.

Simone Collins:With the case What did she do?

Malcolm Collins:She she let her loose herself, and then she threw herself out a window. Right?

Simone Collins:That’s not how you kill yourself. Everyone knows that’s not how you kill yourself.

Malcolm Collins:Especially a nurse.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Yeah. Everyone knows. You I mean, maybe if she was in a warm bathtub and she did it. Yeah. But she drove into a cold

Malcolm Collins:frozen weather with cuts, which immediately stopped the bleeding. They she wasn’t even bleeding when they found her.

Simone Collins:Wait. She got in a car after jumping out a window?

Malcolm Collins:No. In frozen weather. The outside was cold.

Simone Collins:Oh. Oh, she’s a nurse. No. Okay. That’s she wasn’t trying to hurt herself. I mean, she was

Malcolm Collins:Well, then why do you think she did it? Like, what’s your motivation? I mean, obviously, she gave up $3,000,000, but I wouldn’t have predicted that.

Simone Collins:She oh, the raising $6,000,000 thing? That’s for her legal fund anyway, I think, or $3,000,000. Her her legal fund is or GoFundMe. It’s, like, 3,300,000. Continue. No. I I can’t I cannot fathom why someone would do this. I can’t there’s just nothing there’s nothing in me. Even, like, it would be easier if there was some female serial killer, but, like, to bring your own children into the world. And, also, like, something really snapped with me. I mean, this is coming from someone who I, like, I told you point blank before I had Octavian that I wasn’t sure I would love our kids. Mhmm. She did, by the way.

Malcolm Collins:And she really meant it. And I

Simone Collins:was like, I really meant it

Malcolm Collins:for you.

Simone Collins:Yeah. I was I was I was genuinely concerned because I am not a kid person. Did I make

Malcolm Collins:you feel any better the way I responded to that when I was just like, yeah.

Simone Collins:Yeah. I felt really safe about it. And I’ve always felt really grateful to you for all that. And I’ve always I never had any doubt in my heart that you wouldn’t adore our children. And but what shocked me and what makes this even more disturbing and shocking for me is that after I had kids and especially more kids, it it got more powerful with each new kid I have. I cannot I can’t even, like, hear about other people’s kids. Like, I will watch an adult get hurt now, and I’ll be like, that person was once a child, and then I start crying. That is that is how bad it is. The level of vulnerability and emotional care that having kids has opened up to me. I don’t know, like, how did she didn’t have that. Like, I there’s, like, this barrier that would prevent me from doing that. And and so that’s why I can’t wrap my head around that. But then even just from a logical standpoint, like, let’s pretend something something hormonally didn’t happen to her that happened to me, and she doesn’t have that barrier that would prevent her from hurting her children. Why? Like, why put your body through that and, like, all the stuff and all the investment and then do that?

Malcolm Collins:Oh, by the way, Simone.

Simone Collins:This is I mean, I think this is why there’s that most of her defenders just think her husband did

Malcolm Collins:it because it’s so imagine. Well and, again, it can be hard. Like, Lindsay Clancy, I don’t know if you are aware of this, but she was a Catholic. And if you’re from

Simone Collins:a group Oh, great. Fantastic. Again. I mean, I genuinely

Malcolm Collins:patterns, people. Like, this is the thing. I know that the patterns are there. Are you double checking?

Simone Collins:No. I’m just getting a day since Malcolm rails against Catholics counter. Oh. Hours actually yeah. Hours since accident counter. There we go. Yep. Oh, you can oh, that one’s expensive. LED digital safety scoreboard days without accident counter.

Malcolm Collins:No. You’re gonna have a remote. Background of the podcast?

Simone Collins:It has a remote. But I can get oh, there are battery powered ones that cost. These are expensive. What a oh, man. This is up for stupid compliance stuff. They’re charging way too much way too much. I’m just gonna have to get a whiteboard or something. What? A $322 for a disgusting hold on. I gotta I gotta use your your amazing podcast editing software so I can I can share my screen here because it it’s actually really good? K. Look at this. This this disgusting eagle I mean, I love I love patriotism, but this is this is an affront to design. 329 what? What yeah. What is this? It is it is one like, one of those stupid compliance things. Bet it’s, like, some people are statutorily required to have oh, there we go. Oh, no. That’s a countdown. It’s it’s see, look at this. 199? Your safety starts here. That this must be a statutory like, people are legally required to buy these, so they make these horrible looking counters. Anyway, I’ll I’ll I’ll maybe I’ll get one, like, on Etsy. That’s see, this this one would have been great. This is fine. $128. That is ridiculous. Shame. Shame. Anyway, really nice feature. Thank for thank you for building that feature. I I appreciate it. It’s good. This has this has been horrible. I’m traumatized.

Malcolm Collins:I Yeah. But I but I but I think the the core takeaways for me in doing this is, one, have strict prohibitions against it. Two Yes. It’s useful to contextualize the kids as being part of the mother, but the responsibility the mother has is to the future child who’s going to be an adult, not to the baby. Right?

Simone Collins:Like Yeah. It’s it’s like it’s like a a one way membrane barrier. I don’t remember what those are called. We’re like, you give your child every bit of self preservation and defense and self care you have, in fact, to your own detriment, but none of your self hatred and self loathing and self harm is allowed to pass. And that’s at least what I feel hormonally. I just don’t know how that’s not passing to other people. And what’s disturbing, and I don’t know if you covered this, but it’s, like, the copycat cases that are happening, that that a woman who’s very invested in their case just killed her two year old. In Lindsay Clancy’s case, it’s it’s clear that there was an influence there. And now women are also doing these TikTok videos where they are acting out their internalized thoughts about their children, where they’ll have these, like, videos where, like, they’ll they’ll film themselves, like, carrying their kids around the house, like, through a doorway, say. And then they’ll, like like, cut the video in the middle and be holding a baby doll and slam the baby doll’s head against the door. That kind of thing. You know? Like, throw baby dolls out windows in intercut with footage of them with their actual kids. So we know their mother’s great. Them acting out these internalized thoughts. This is all downstream of Lindsay Clancy. This is why I can’t be on the Internet anymore. I just can’t. I just can’t. I I the like, everywhere I go, someone’s talking about this. And and and it the horrible thing is the the act of talking about it appears to be making it happen more.

Malcolm Collins:Here’s another thing that made this worse, and I think that this is a problem that a lot of Christian groups have as well in terms of dealing with this, is they’ll go out there and they’ll say, you know, abortion is murder or whatever. Right? Killing baby is murder. But that baby is immediately in heaven when they die. And that’s how Lindsay Clancy justified this to herself as a Catholic.

Simone Collins:Is that what she said?

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. I mean, she said that she knew that the babies would go directly to heaven, so she’d be able to join them there when she killed herself, and it would be fine. That’s no. You don’t

Simone Collins:she’s you don’t go to heaven when you murder children.

Malcolm Collins:This at at the very least, she thought they went to heaven. Right? And so this idea that, you know, the overly easy heaven, I think, is also a problem. Right? Like, just all babies go to heaven. You don’t need to worry about it. Everything’s fine. I think that can also create immoral behavior. Because then it’s easy. Right? Like, why not? Right? Like, if if you’ve already consigned yourself to not going to heaven or you have a lapse of moral judgment about yourself. Like, well, I’m doing this for a good reason. Therefore, it’s okay.

Simone Collins:I have so little chill with this.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. Well, I’m I’m I’m interested in in in the copycat, actually. Why did she think it was okay?

Simone Collins:I don’t know. It just happened, so I think it’s all. I don’t know if there’s much understanding as to why and how it happened.

Malcolm Collins:Well, now you guys owe us because you made Simone go through this moral torment. So congrats. Thanks, guys. A******s.

Simone Collins:And then look. I mean, there are multiple people who requested this episode. And so I I hold you all. I hold you all responsible for the future sleepless night.

Malcolm Collins:Well, why don’t you sign up for our Substack or Patreon? You know?

Simone Collins:You can money hoist. I can cry into the dollar bills. That’ll be great. Yeah. Just keep keep in mind that you’re gonna be contributing to someone who, if they gain any insane amount of power, is probably going to do unspeakable vaporizing things to people that hurt children. So

Malcolm Collins:Very interesting. The woman who did the copycat killing was sort of an inversion of Lindsay Clancy. Lindsay Clancy was like well, she wanted to give her kids to go to god or go to heaven so that they could, you know, immediately be in heaven, whereas the copycat killer said that her child was the devil or the antichrist. And so, again, for both of these women I wanna point this out here. When you wanna be like, this is the problem of secular society, both of these women did this for partially religious reasons. And they are inversions of each other where Lindsay Clancy, the original case, may have had some sort of twisted even I don’t know. Whatever. But the other one seemed to the one who obsessively followed the Lindsay Clancy case seemed to hate her children. It’s disgust. And I think that that was brought up by the way people have reacted to the Lindsey Clancy case. These acting out of the things I wanna do to my children because I hate them, etcetera. Anyway, love you, Simone, and thank you for not killing our kids.

Simone Collins:Gonna crawl under a rock, never come out, except to take care of

Malcolm Collins:our kids. This is why the Technopuritans have to win, create a city on a hill, and then handle the rest of civilization. Is it

Simone Collins:I believe we’re sent Octavian’s addiction to GI Joe because their theme song is stuck in my head,

Malcolm Collins:and it’s this g GI Joe. GI Joe was there.

Simone Collins:It’s GI Joe versus Cobra the enemy. Cobra the enemy. Cobra the enemy.

Malcolm Collins:Oh. Or you gotta get him into something more, you know, classy. Right? You can get him into Johnny Quest real adventure of the Johnny Quest.

Simone Collins:My gosh. We we need to find that. That’ll be so much better. That’s a much better opening theme song with the,

Malcolm Collins:It’s a great opening scene. I regularly listen to it. It’s, like, on my my song playlist. That’s my life these days. I’m hanging out with all these Internet people

Simone Collins:and dodging It’s like in canyons. You know? Of course.

Malcolm Collins:That’s All my all my anime girlfriends.

Simone Collins:Typical day. Typical days. Is Haji’s in that. Right?

Malcolm Collins:Haji’s yeah. Haji’s in that. Okay. My god. Oh, yeah. Is Haji Sikh or just generically Indian? I’m gonna

Simone Collins:ask because I don’t think he’s Sikh. I think he’s generically Indian, Haji, from Johnny Quest. Indian or Sikh?

Malcolm Collins:Islamic.

Simone Collins:He’s Indian by nationality and Sikh by religious and cultural background.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, so he is Sikh?

Simone Collins:Yeah. Wow. He’s an orphan from India, specifically found in Calcutta, who becomes doctor Benton’s Quest adopted or oh, yeah. Doctor doctor Benton Quest adopted son and Johnny’s adopted brother. Oh, yeah. I I forgot he wore a turban. I I I I memory hold his turban. Simone, let me go.

Malcolm Collins:I’ll get I’ll get started here.

Simone Collins:Oh, boy.

Speaker 11:What? What you doing in that? Yeah.

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