An opinion column published by the Washington Examiner and promoted by the outlet's X account warns that American culture is teaching young women to fear motherhood, and points to a series of recent killings of young children by their mothers as evidence that "tragedies like it are becoming all too common in America."
The column, titled "We're teaching young women to fear motherhood" and attributed to Marissa Streit as part of the outlet's "Restoring America" series, was circulated Saturday by the Washington Examiner, an account with 374,000 followers.
The piece opens by invoking "the killing of the Clancy children in Massachusetts," which it describes as a horror to readers, and then widens its lens, asserting that mothers "from California to Missouri to New Jersey" have killed their own young children. It singles out one case in detail: the shooting death of a four-year-old girl named Vivian in a West Houston townhome, said to have been carried out by her mother, Cibelle Kubala, hours after she lost primary custody.
The column's central argument is cultural rather than legal. Modern society, it contends, emphasizes the sacrifices of raising children while overlooking "the meaning and growth it can bring," with the result that young women are taught to view motherhood as something to dread rather than to desire.
The Examiner's framing places the column alongside a broader and less political conversation about the pressures of early motherhood. Other coverage of the same subject includes a first-person therapy essay, "The exact things I say to mothers in my therapy room," which addresses "mum rage to burnout" and shares ten lessons a maternal mental health therapist wishes every mother knew.
The two threads — the cultural argument and the clinical one — have run in parallel as the Examiner column travels through conservative media circles. The posts carrying it treat the alleged cases as symptoms of a society that has devalued parenthood, while the therapy essay approaches exhausted mothers with practical reassurance rather than diagnosis of the culture at large.
Next News Network could not independently verify the underlying events described in the Examiner column, including the Massachusetts and Texas cases and the claim that such killings are increasing.
Our Take
The Examiner column does something the therapy essay cannot: it refuses to treat maternal despair as an isolated personal problem. If a culture spends decades telling young women that children are a burden on their careers, their finances and their freedom, it should surprise no one when that message is absorbed by women at their most vulnerable. The clinical literature on maternal mental health is real, and the therapist writing about burnout is doing necessary work. But treating individual mothers while leaving the cultural message intact is like bailing water without patching the hull. The Examiner is right to name the fear being taught. The question for conservatives is whether we will do more than name it — whether our churches, schools, families and public policy will actually make motherhood look like the good it is.
