The Value of Life

On May 11, 2024, at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, Kansas City Chiefs placekicker, Harrison Butker delivered, what was considered by many people on the left, as a highly controversial commencement address. In his speech, he said, “For the ladies present today, congratulations on an amazing accomplishment. You should be proud of all that you have achieved to this point in your young lives. I want to speak directly to you briefly because I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you. How many of you are sitting here now about to cross this stage and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you are going to get in your career? Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.” Immediately, everyone on the left went apoplectic. He was called sexist, misogynistic, patriarchal.

He never said that the woman’s place is in the kitchen or that wives should remain barefoot and pregnant or society should ban women from the workplace. He was merely saying to the women there that whatever you accomplish in life, being a mother will be your greatest achievement. But in this day and age, we’re not allowed to say that or even think that. We are not allowed to tell women that being a mother is better than working for a soulless company who doesn’t know your name and will fire you at the drop of the hat the moment they find someone who is slightly better or a little bit cheaper. Butker was treated with so much hostility because the left believes that no woman should ever choose being a mother over having a career. The pro-choice crowd doesn’t want women to have that choice. They celebrate women if they choose to kill their babies, but they will mock a woman, if she chooses to devote herself to raising her baby. 

In my professional life, I’ve held some fairly high-profile jobs; I was in the NFL as a coach and an executive for 23 years. I had the type of job that many men would love to have had. I enjoyed being part of the NFL. It was very rewarding. But when I look back on my life, I can say that my greatest accomplishment, and the thing I’m most proud of is being a parent to my children. Every NFL team I ever work for, that I ever sacrifice for, that I put an extremely long hours for, in the end, fired me. That’s the nature of the NFL, eventually, you’ll be fired. Eventually, they’ll move on from you. You’ll be forgotten, regardless of how much work you did or how much success that you had, you’ll be forgotten, and replaced. I won’t be forgotten by my children or my family. I won’t be somebody who is easily replaced with the next guy.

I returned to Butker’s speech in light of the Lindsay Clancy trial. I’m shocked and amazed at how many women are defending her. Many of her defenders make statements like, “that could’ve been me”. There is a social contagion going on in our country that is telling women that being a mother is a burden, that being a mother is like being a slave, that being a mother is something that women need to be emancipated from. And they feel like that to the point of wanting to kill their children to free themselves. It is very scary. Is being a mother hard? Yes. Is being a mother frustrating? Yes. Is being a mother very difficult? Of course. I can say the same thing about being a father. It’s hard, it’s frustrating, it’s very difficult. Friedrich Nietzsche once said, "he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." If your children are your “why” you are living for, you can bear the difficulties of being a parent. But if you are only living for yourself, and your children are just an accessory for you, then you will not be able to bear the difficulties of parenthood.

Lindsay Clancy is not an isolated incident. In the past two years, there have been almost a dozen women in this country who have murdered their own children.

Corrie Walsh of Frankfort, Illinois strangled her 2-year-old son to death on September 7, 2026;

Marlene Vidal of Edinburg, Texas, set fire to her SUV with her 5-year-old and 6-year-old inside, killing both of them on September 1, 2026;

Kailey Erhart of Mandan, ND, stabbed her 3-year-old son and 5-month-old baby to death on August 6, 2026;

Sarah Myers of Mechanicville, New York, poisoned her four children to death on August 4, 2026 and then killed herself;

Monika Rubacha of Lakewood Ranch, Florida, killed her two children and then herself on February 26, 2026;

Cynthia Robinson of Chester, Pennsylvania, beat her 20-month-old son to death in November 2025;

Irene Whitehead of Cedar Springs, Michigan killed her 2-year-old daughter and 2-month-old son in September, 2025;

Oninda Romelus of Brazoria, Texas, shot her four children, killing two of them on October 4, 2025;

Marisol Vasquez of Chicago, Illinois suffocated her 1-year-old daughter on December 20, 2024.

The defense of these women is that they have mental illness and that is what caused them to kill their children. That may be true. 54 years ago, shortly after Roe v Wade was passed, Father Fulton Sheen prophetically warned, “Think about how many mentally disturbed women we are going to have in the United States, in the next 10 to 15 years, when the guilt of abortion begins to attack their mind and soul… years from now, the guilt will come out in a peculiar way.” I wonder how many of these women who have murdered their children, had abortions in their lives, had already become used to and even immune to killing their children? Or how many were ravaged by the guilt of killing their child in the womb?

The pro-abortion crowd tells women who get pregnant at an inopportune time to go to the doctor and have that baby inside of them killed. The baby is inconvenient right now, the baby will make your life harder, it will make life more difficult, so you have the right to kill the baby. That is the mindset of many on the left; if the baby is inconvenient to you, it suddenly has no value, and you have the right to kill it. The mother is told that the baby is only valuable if she wants it, but if she does not want it, it has absolutely no value, it is garbage to be thrown in the trash. It’s shocking. It’s not that big of a step from abortion to infanticide. Those three children were very inconvenient to Lindsay Clancy, so she killed them. The moment we stopped seeing a baby as a gift from God, and the moment we re-categorize the baby as something that is disposable and easily done away with, we set ourselves down the road to Lindsay Clancy, and other copycats that we’ve witnessed recently.

Women in our society have been told, not that motherhood is a good thing, not that motherhood is fulfilling, not that motherhood is going to be your greatest accomplishment in life, they are being told that motherhood is nothing more than pure drudgery, that motherhood is akin to slavery, that babies are parasites. That’s what they’ve been indoctrinated to believe. They don’t look at their children as their beautiful wonderful offspring who they love and who will love them back for the rest of their life; they look at their children, as if they are the oppressors, and they see themselves as being oppressed.

They believe that their children are what’s holding them back from having a happy life, a productive life, a fulfilling life. Their children are the slave owners, and the mothers are the slaves. That’s the narrative that women are being fed these days. That’s why there was so much backlash to what Harrison Butker said. He said being a mother is something you will be most excited about, and he was absolutely excoriated on social media over it. They attacked him with bloodthirsty rage. They treated him as if he was saying, we should bring slavery back. And the end result of not valuing or honoring motherhood, is that children will end up dead. Lindsay Clancy is not an isolated incident. It’s happening over and over and over again because people are telling women that being a mother is tantamount to slavery and oppression. 

Barack Obama, summed the left’s view on motherhood in 2008, when he was speaking about the need for abortion. He referenced his two daughters when he said, “if they make a mistake [get pregnant], I donʼt want them punished with a baby.” It’s that type of language that leads Lindsay Clancy to do what she did and all these other women continuing to follow in her path. People see having children as punishment, not as a gift from God, not even as a bundle of joy, but a punishment. Modern life has become solely about maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. Having children and being a parent does the exact opposite. It’s hard work. It’s difficult. But if you measure the quality of your life, not by how much pleasure you’ve received or how much pain you avoided, but by how much you were willing to sacrifice some of your pleasure and endure some pain to ensure that your children grow to become productive human beings, then being a parent will be completely fulfilling.

We should not be shocked at what Lindsay Clancy did after seeing the pure hateful outrage that was directed at Harrison Buckner for his comments about the importance of motherhood. Lindsay Clancy did not do what she did because her brain was ravaged by postpartum depression or flooded with a slew of antidepressant drugs, she killed her three children because her brain had been poisoned with the anti-child, and anti-mother rhetoric that has been promulgated through our culture over the last 50 years, that is the poison that ultimately made her strangle the life out of her three children, and it is the same poison that is strangling the life out of our culture and country.

__________________________________________________________

Mr. Garrett is a graduate of Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.