A woman named Lindsay Clancy is on trial in Massachusetts for murdering her three small children. The question is not whether she did it. The question is what her state of mind was when she strangled them to death, whether she is truly culpable for her actions. From there, the court can decide what punishment gives proper justice to Cora, Dawson, and Callan.

The trial is revealing something else: Lindsay Clancy’s state of mind today. She cries often during proceedings. She holds her head in her hands and her shoulders heave as she weeps listening to details of the crime she committed. Witness questioning had to be suspended at one point as she broke down sobbing with grief, remorse, pain. I do not know what kind of horror tore through Ms. Clancy’s heart and mind on the evening she took three precious and innocent lives. What seems certain now is that she is spiritually and emotionally devastated. The loss of her children, and the knowledge that she is the one who killed them, appears to torment her waking hours and haunt her while she sleeps. Whatever the verdict and the sentence at trial, I suspect that no earthly punishment will come close to the suffering that Ms. Clancy likely already endures.

Something hit me as I watched the heartbreaking news coverage of Lindsay Clancy in the courtroom. She is not alone, I thought. Much of the media coverage and political debate surrounding the trial has focused on overmedication and postpartum depression. Those are very important and must be discussed, as the public outcry reveals many women suffer in silence from those harms. But Lindsay Clancy is not alone in another sense as well. There have been more than sixty-five million abortions in the United States these past five-plus decades. Many women have had multiple abortions, but even so there are tens of millions of mothers who, like Lindsay, live with the guilt, the shame, the terror of having ended the lives of their children. The grief Lindsay Clancy experiences in front of the news cameras of the world is what millions and millions of other women go through alone.

“My children are gone because of me.”

“I took innocent life.”

“May God and my baby forgive me for what I have done.”

These are thoughts that only the mothers of murdered children will understand. No man, no boyfriend, no ex-husband, no priest, even, could comprehend living with this kind of inner agony.

The law says what it says, and juries, judges, and jailers will do what they do. I don’t know how Lindsay Clancy’s trial will turn out, and I don’t know the answers to the medical, political, and legal questions swirling right now. What I can see, plainly, is that the mother of three murdered children has been destroyed in heart, mind, and soul, as her children were destroyed in their tiny bodies.

What we all know, if we admit it, is that the United States is filled with women in a similar state. Perhaps we can’t see it. Perhaps they are good at hiding it, from others and from themselves. But the mothers of the murdered, the women whose wombs were crime scenes of infanticide, are with us in their dozens of millions. If Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial has taught me anything, it is that she represents the collective, deeply individual heartbreak of millions and millions of other American women.