The Christian Worldview

David Wheaton: Murder your children and society demands, "Release her." That is a topic we'll discuss today in the Christian Worldview Radio Program, where the mission is to sharpen the biblical worldview of Christians and to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. I'm David Wheaton, the host, and our website is thechristianworldview.org.

On January 24, 2023, Lindsay Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse in Massachusetts, sent her husband off for some errands. While he was away, she took their three children, Cora, age five, Dawson, age three, and Callan, only eight months old, into the basement and, one by one, strangled them to death.

Fast forward to this year and the recent murder trial for Lindsay Clancy. Women in pink shirts amassed outside the courthouse day after day, not to demand justice for Clancy's three murdered children, but to urge the jury to acquit Lindsay Clancy.

So the question is, why are these women cheering on and thanking the murderer, Lindsay Clancy? The surface reason of her defense attorneys is that Lindsay was suffering from mental illness where she was not able to understand what she was doing. Postpartum depression, and possibly antidepressants, caused a psychotic break to occur inside her.

Thus, the "I am Lindsay" supporters outside the courthouse and around the country empathized that this poor woman was a victim who should be acquitted rather than be found culpable for murder. The jury deliberated and deliberated and finally submitted their verdict. 11 of 12 voted to acquit Lindsay Clancy of murder, while just one remained steadfast that she was culpable. Because of a non-unanimous jury, the case ended in a mistrial.

What does the Lindsay Clancy murder case say about our justice system, the worldview of our society about women, children, and even abortion? How is the second victim narrative employed for women who murder their children or abort their unborn babies?

Missy Ropnak is the mother of nine children. She has spent years doing sidewalk counseling at abortion clinics to persuade women not to abort their babies, but instead repent and believe the gospel. Missy recently wrote a series of articles on the Lindsay Clancy case, one of which appears in the September-October issue of the Christian Worldview Journal. She joins us to discuss the worldview at play in this case that is drawing national attention.

Missy, it's great to have you on the Christian Worldview Radio Program for the first time. Let's start out by you telling us about your background, how God brought you to saving faith in Christ, and what your life is like now.

Missy Ropnak: David, thank you so much for having me on the Christian Worldview. I admire not only this ministry but the endurance of it over the past 20 years, especially when so many ministries are being sidetracked. As you're asking me about my testimony, I'm just amazed to even be sharing it here because I was so lost for so many years.

I was actually born again when I was 33 after a false conversion. My husband and I both attended a Christian school for most of our lives, but we were not born again. I definitely lived that double life of a false convert in high school. What that looked like was that I was on an evangelism team and was even a co-host for a Christian radio program. I was in the prayer clubs and honor clubs, and yet my life was just full of these shocking sins under the surface that would sometimes be revealed.

As I went on to college, the mask fell and my life was openly sinful. I hate to even think about those years. After college, I cleaned up my act enough to get back to church and kept getting rebaptized at various beach baptisms, but I could not control my sins or addictions for any length of time because I wasn't actually born again. I was operating under my own strength. I even became a Christian school teacher around this time and met my husband, who was also living this double life. We really felt like we'd hit the jackpot in each other and found someone that we could go to church with and then live how we wanted.

Fast forward to the age of 33. We have two young children. One day while they're napping, something prompted me to pick up the Bible that my parents had given me in middle school. While I was reading, the Lord opened my eyes and showed me that I had gotten it all wrong. I was a works-based girl, and my works were bad. The Ten Commandments fell hard on me that day and showed me my own sin, which opened my eyes to my need for Christ. I had true repentance for the first time in my life, understanding that my sins had separated me from a holy God and that He was offering me a mediator.

I remember lying down on my floor, just overwhelmed by a sense of how holy God is. It's something that I had missed entirely, and with it, I'd missed the gospel. But the Lord revealed it to me in His perfect timing. All those years of Christian education that I never really understood at Christian school clicked into place, and I had this salvation moment by the grace of God. I started in on my husband as he would come home from work each day, just sharing what I was learning from God's word. The Lord saved him as well in such a beautiful way.

We were actually baptized together and we went on to have nine children by adoption and birth. Immediately, we were called into adoption and evangelism. Evangelism is truly my passion, and that eventually led to sidewalk counseling at abortion clinics. Now, based on the season of life I'm in with seven teenagers and two littles, I've moved into discipling teenagers within the local church. I feel that abortion ministry prepared me for that by giving me this vision of what was at stake in these young people's lives. So basically, I'm a homeschool mom by day and by night, I'm a writer, and my writing focuses on family discipleship and evangelism.

David Wheaton: Amazing salvation story, Missy, just to hear how you grew up around the church and so forth, but weren't genuinely saved and how God convicted you of your sin just through His word. I never get tired of hearing that story. So thank you for sharing that. Now, I want to hear more about your family because you have a unique family makeup with nine children, and that you also do sidewalk counseling, as you mentioned, at abortion clinics. Tell us more about your family and adoption, and then what you try to do as you meet with women at abortion clinics as they're going in for abortions.

Missy Ropnak: Soon after we were born again, God called us into adoption. It was clear. We had two toddlers at home and adopted two beautiful children from Ethiopia. Afterwards, I took up advocating for hard-to-place cases, and a file from China came across my desk that just broke my heart. She was a six-year-old little girl who had a severe form of dwarfism with limb deformities, keeping her the size of a four-year-old for life. She had this short window of time for someone to adopt her and the Lord led us to say yes. We ended up adding another boy from China with dwarfism to that same adoption who's also now our son.

After four adoptions, we've just seen our own spiritual adoption mirrored in those processes. One illustration I like to give is that for the first five years of Haven's life in the orphanage, they kept her swaddled in a crib and bottle-fed with a shaved head due to her dwarfism. She had seen families come for other children, but she just had no reason to believe anyone was coming for her because of her age. We knew this, and we knew that the process would be long before we actually got to her. So we wanted to let her know that we were coming for her.

We sent her this photo album full of pictures of our family and we labeled each picture with "Haven's mom" or "Haven's sisters." We had one that showed Haven's room, which was filled with dolls and dresses laid out on the bed for her. We had someone give her this photo album at the orphanage and take pictures of her as she was receiving it. She walked into the room in total despair. As the promises of that photo book hit her, she just exploded with absolute joy. She was shrieking and laughing as she learned that she now had seven siblings and a giant dog and that some of her siblings were from Ethiopia. She just instantly believed all of it.

What strikes me is, why did she? She had no reason to believe us, but she left the room with this sustained lasting joy, even though her circumstances were not actually going to change for several months. We saw her belief a few months later when my husband flew in with her. I was there at the airport waiting to meet her. There's this walkway at the Raleigh airport where you can see people coming, but no one from the receiving side can cross the security line. We've got this crowd of our friends and family waiting on the other side of that line.

As she caught sight of me, she took off running as fast as she could go. She was screaming, "Mama, Mama!" and it felt like the whole airport stopped to watch. I just think this is a picture of the belief that God gives us, allowing us to trust in His promises. It's the "already and the not yet" of our own spiritual adoption. This is how I feel about God's word. I cling to it. God has sent us like a photo album filled with His promises for us, and we have to wait in faith in a broken world and trust in the unseen. For me, God's word is where I'm placing all of my hope and faith.

That hope is what I am carrying and speaking into the women that I counsel at the abortion clinics or in the youth room for student ministry. I know that some of what you and I are going to discuss today, David, is going to be hard for some of you to hear, especially for those of you who've already had or helped someone have an abortion. Let me state clearly and definitively that the sin of abortion is no match for the cross of Christ. His blood for yours. He died so that you might live.

Abortion is murder and you're going to hear me call it that, but God's standard for what makes you dead in your sins isn't some line where abortion and murder are just above the cutoff. The cutoff is below us at birth. We have all sinned and our sins separate us from a holy God. Jesus also says that if we have murder in our hearts when we hate our brother, and if we have broken one of His commandments, we've broken them all. Those commandments are the standard for righteousness and our sins separate us.

So we all need a mediator, and all of the Old Testament points to this. All the sacrifices in the desert, all of the blood, all of those lambs pointed towards a final spotless lamb who would pay for the sins of the world, live the sinless life we could not, die the death we deserved, and then rise again, defeating sin and death. This is the gospel. So you do not have to carry your guilt and shame over a past abortion or any other sin. You can turn to Jesus in repentance and faith and your sins will be nailed to that cross.

Secondly, if you're already born again and you have repented in faith for your sins, including a past abortion, don't try to pry your guilt back off that cross. It's gone. As far as the east is from the west. Psalm 103:12. This is the message of hope that I offer to post-abortive women. It's also the message that keeps me focused on the purpose of my ministry. That being said, I need to be able to speak directly to the misplaced victimhood of abortion.

David Wheaton: Missy Ropnak with us today here on the Christian Worldview. We're about to get to the Lindsay Clancy murder case in a minute. But just one more thing about sidewalk counseling at abortion clinics. In the videos I often watch of that, Missy, it just comes across as an intense place where there's a raging spiritual battle taking place between those who want to tell these women, "Don't murder your child, your child's made in the image of God," and then those who just hard-heartedly go forward. You see these confrontations there. This is a difficult environment.

I want to read just a short portion of an article that you wrote recently. This article is featured in our September-October issue of the Christian Worldview Journal. I'm just going to read a paragraph. You say, "While I was sidewalk counseling, a mother once explained to me why she could not accept her unborn baby's medical diagnosis. She felt she had no choice but to murder her baby by abortion. After a longer conversation, I offered to adopt her baby." You write, "I was dead serious. In response, the woman placed her hand protectively over her visible pregnancy bump, right over her baby, and locked eyes with me. She said, 'I would rather deliver my baby girl alive and strangle her with my own hands than allow a Christian to adopt and raise her.' Then she turned on her heel and walked into the abortion clinic, leaving me outside. I watched her leave a few hours later, laughing with her companion. She walked lighter and her shirt hung looser in the front."

Then you finish by saying, "When I repeat these stories, people who don't do abortion counseling are visibly overwhelmed by the shock of it and inevitably say something like, 'They don't mean that.' I tell you today," you write, "they absolutely do." Missy, I'd like you to tell us more just about what this spiritual battle is like and why that is a statement that you heard. I'm sure that was an extreme case, but I'm sure there are more like it. It's not so much that the women don't really mean saying that. There's an intentionality here of murdering their unborn child.

Missy Ropnak: Yes, David, it is a spiritual battle for sure. In terms of maintaining a God-glorifying perspective through this, I look at why I went to begin with, which was my daughter Haven. Doctors had told us quite bluntly that the reason for the lack of medical data available for treatment options for her is because the other children with her condition are aborted. So much so that there've only been a handful of people in the world like her who've been allowed to be born.

Yet we know that babies with infirmities are created for God's glory to be displayed. We see that in John 9:3 when Jesus says that the man was born blind so that the works of God might be displayed in him. It was thinking of children like her that were lost to abortion that motivated us to try abortion clinic outreach with a local ministry here in Raleigh called Gospel of God Ministries. I remember thinking on my first day serving that I was just going to show up with love and explain to these poor women walking in that it was a baby, not a fetus, because they probably didn't know this and that I could show them a picture of Haven and they would instantly decide not to abort their own baby that was diagnosed with something in utero.

Perhaps I would even offer to adopt their babies as a last resort like what you just discussed. Well, after my first day, I just sat in my car and wept over so many things. The darkness of just standing on that property, the wickedness or slavery of the women walking in, and mostly my own naivety over what this ministry should look like. I had to identify and repent from what I realized was my own doubt that the gospel was sufficient in all ministry and that it has the power to save even at the abortion clinic.

Because when you drive by, you think, why are these people protesting? Why are they even mentioning sin or murder? Just offer them resources and love because these women are victims of their circumstances who need help. They don't need Bible verses. I was thinking when I thought that way in terms of a misapplied concept called the second victim narrative. This narrative is something I've been addressing in my discernment series because most of us now have fallen into this way of thinking, even just a little bit, without realizing it.

It affects how we do evangelism and ministry. It's also something that the church and the pro-life movement have been influenced by for decades and it's this idea that the mothers who are walking into the abortion clinics are also the victims of abortion and that we should treat them as such in our outreach towards them. It's also affecting how we discern the issues like feminism, politics, race, gender, and how we discern world events. We've seen this revealed with the Clancy case, which is one of the biggest recent examples where the lie of the second victim has been played out.

This lie replaces the victim with the perpetrator, trading evil for good, which is something God hates, and it's so evident at the abortion clinic. So going back to the first day serving, I didn't meet any victims of abortion that day except for the babies being carried to their death in their mothers' wombs. To this day, after over a decade of abortion-related ministry, I have not met anyone who's a victim of abortion alongside their babies except for in two cases. One is when mothers do not want an abortion and are literally forced to have one by their parents or captors.

Another, which is not often discussed, are the fathers who have no legal power to stop women from killing their child, husbands and unmarried alike. The father has no say and there's no paper to sign. The fathers have been removed or have removed themselves by their own desertion. So abortion ministry really is wrapped up in Isaiah 1:17, which tells us to bring justice to the fatherless. These children are the fatherless, and the hearts of a majority of the mothers we meet at the clinic are not anything close to a victim.

They pull in with school pickup tags hanging from their rearview. Others with Christian bumper stickers. Women of means tell me that they don't want to be pregnant for their trip to Italy and they'll try again for another baby when they get back. Women in poverty tell me that abortion is empowering to them and they use it as birth control, some having five or more abortions. They absolutely know it is a baby at this point in modern science. They are not denying that anymore.

Some have argued with me that they should be able to kill their toddler if they want to. If you look at some of the recent Dutch laws, it's clear that if it were legal, women would kill their toddlers. I'm no longer even surprised by this because Romans 1 tells us that human wickedness would increase to this point. Not all moments are like this either. There's these moments of such beauty in abortion ministry. Sometimes a woman hears the gospel and responds by turning to life by God's grace and she raises her baby or places him for adoption. Although I must say the majority of the cases are shocking and we're mislabeling the victim in all of them.

David Wheaton: It's pretty much ubiquitous, the second victim narrative heavily at play in the worldview of our society. Missy Ropnak is our guest today. We have links to her writing at thechristianworldview.org. One of her columns on Lindsay Clancy is also in the September-October issue of the Christian Worldview Journal. Much more coming up with Missy after this short break. I'm David Wheaton and you are listening to the Christian Worldview Radio Program.

The September-October issue of the Christian Worldview Journal features a column by Rod Martin explaining why Christianity commands capitalism. Missy Ropnak writes about Lindsay Clancy, who murdered her three young children, and the widespread sympathy she has received. Pastor Matt Morrell turns to beloved Psalm 23 and shows how God's names compel a deeper love and trust in Him. The Christian Worldview Journal is a print and digital publication designed to sharpen your biblical worldview on current events.