Researchers now say the timing of when a boy hits puberty may predict his long-term risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, or depression, and could help explain why men, on average, die younger than women.

The insights I discovered researching this piece are fascinating.

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The ripple effects of the case, however, are already being felt far and wide.

“There is no question that press coverage of famous, controversial cases can cause seismic shifts in what happens afterward,” a professor at New York Law School, Michael Perlin, tells me. He points to the aftermath of John Hinckley Jr.’s attempted assassination of President Reagan as the clearest historical parallel.

Mr. Hinckley’s 1982 acquittal by reason of insanity set off a wave of state-level reforms that tightened the insanity defense nationwide and led Congress to shift the burden of proof onto defendants in federal cases through the Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984.

After the Clancy case, medical experts warn, there’s a real and growing risk of a mother who admits to intrusive thoughts or a dark moment ending up in a hospital bed she didn’t ask for; losing her newborn to child protective service; or even facing legal action. That fear is already taking hold in exam rooms far from Plymouth County.

The Fear of Overtreating

At the trial, much of Ms. Clancy’s defense was aimed squarely her doctors. In his closing argument, the lead defense attorney, Kevin Reddington ,argued that the health care system had doped her up on more than a dozen medications for generalized anxiety disorder, postpartum depression, a major depressive episode and insomnia, without properly treating what was underneath.

He told the jury it was that overmedication, not premeditation, that triggered the killings.

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A similar situation faces expectant mothers in dozens of states, where the local labor and delivery unit has either shut down or is one bad budget year away from it. A new analysis from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform found that 720 rural hospitals — just under a third of all rural facilities nationwide — were at risk of closure as of May. Of those, 294 were in immediate jeopardy. A follow-up count in July put the number at roughly 700, with just over 260 in immediate danger.

That dip should not read as good news. Fewer hospitals “at risk” often just means fewer hospitals still standing to be counted.

Here is what is at stake.

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They learned the results mid-filming, during a gender reveal. Trisomy 21 appeared on the same page as the sex of the baby. The deeply personal decision was met with death threats. House Speaker Mike Johnson called it “evil.” Parents of children with Down syndrome posted photos and pushed back — sharing stories of joy, love, and lives well-lived.

Beneath the fury, however, a set of deeply uncomfortable statistics began quietly circulating. Statistics most Americans have never been asked to confront.

By going public, the Ridgways stumbled into a question this country has long preferred to leave unasked: whether prenatal testing is slowly, quietly doing away with Down syndrome entirely.

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Start with the system itself.

The price has always had a name

Child marriage in Afghanistan does not exist in a vacuum. It is entrenched in a set of long-standing economic and customary practices that predate the Taliban by centuries and have survived every government, every invasion, and every attempt at reform.

The dominant mechanism is the walwar, a bride price paid by the groom’s family to the bride’s father. In Dari-speaking areas it is called toyana or sherbaha. The walwar is a transaction between men, in which a girl’s father receives cash or goods in exchange for his daughter’s hand. Older girls typically fetch higher prices, creating perverse incentives. Families in extreme economic distress who lack older unmarried daughters sometimes feel compelled to offer younger ones instead.

Then there is baad, which bypasses the transaction entirely and goes straight to punishment. A man in your family kills someone, steals something, or loses a dispute. A jirga decides the matter is settled when a daughter is handed over to the other side. Pervasive is how the UN describes it. She is more a hostage to domestic duties than a wife. In baadal, families agree to exchange daughters, sometimes generations before they are born, to avoid the costs and negotiations of bride prices.

Girls caught trying to escape any of these arrangements are sometimes arrested for zina, the moral crime of running away. That is the system. It was functioning before the Taliban arrived, and it is functioning now. What the Taliban have done is dismantle every obstacle that once slowed it down.

The Taliban didn’t invent this. They industrialized it.

UN Women projects that if the bans on girls’ education continue, Afghanistan will see a 25 percent rise in child marriages, a 45 percent increase in adolescent pregnancies, and at least a 50 percent surge in maternal deaths by 2026. When a girl cannot go to school, her options collapse to one. Her family’s calculation shifts accordingly.

Then came May 14. The Taliban’s Ministry of Justice published a 31-article regulation on divorce, signed off by supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, and buried inside it is the most explicit legal endorsement of child marriage the group has produced. Fathers and grandfathers now hold formal authority to marry off minors. If a girl says nothing, the law counts that as a yes. No minimum age exists anywhere in the text, and none exists anywhere else either, because the Taliban suspended the old civil code that set the floor at 16.

A girl who wants out of a marriage she was sold into as a child has one route: wait until puberty, then petition a Taliban court for an annulment. The same courts are run by the men who wrote the decree. UNAMA has separately documented Taliban officials acting as perpetrators and enforcers of forced marriages. What goes untracked is almost certainly larger.

Afghanistan is not alone

This is bigger than Afghanistan. One in five women aged 20 to 24 worldwide were married as children. Save the Children ran the numbers on fragile states with high child marriage rates last year and found that in those hotspots, a girl is married every 30 seconds. Around 32 million adolescent girls live in them. Afghanistan is where the crisis is most visible at the moment, not where it starts or ends.

Niger has the highest rate in the world; more than three-quarters of girls there are married before 18, with nearly 30 percent married before 15. The Central African Republic, Chad, Mali, and Bangladesh all register rates above 50 percent. In 105 out of 110 countries with available data, child marriage rates are higher for girls in the poorest wealth quintile than the richest, which tells you what this is really about. It is not culture. It is economics, dressed in the language of culture.

Afghanistan’s situation is in a category of its own. Famine, aid collapse, and the total dismantling of legal protections are happening at the same time, under a government that is not looking the other way on child marriage but building the conditions for it, and writing girls’ exposure into law.

So who is paying?

The nearest buyers are the least scrutinized. Same province, older, sometimes with a wife or two already. They have cash. The girl’s father has no options left. The walwar closes the gap between them. Desperation has widened this market from both ends: more sellers, lower prices, more men who can now afford to buy. At $3,200, this market is not exclusive.

It does not stop at provincial or national borders.

Iran, Pakistan, and India all appear in the State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report as destinations where Afghan girls sold into marriage are exploited in sex trafficking and domestic servitude by their new husbands. Iran is the best-documented corridor: a long, porous border, consistent demand from Iranian men, and girls who arrive as wives and live as confined, unpaid laborers without freedom of movement. Pakistan, home to one of the largest Afghan refugee populations in the world, sees the same flows with the same absence of accountability on either side. Afghan nationals also surface in Gulf state trafficking records in cases involving forced labor and exploitation.

Then there are the buyers nobody talks about, because they live far away from Afghanistan. In my years of reporting on the flow of money in and out of that country, I have found that most of it never goes through a bank. The transaction is handled through hawala. Hawala is a system of honor-based money transfers that has existed longer than any bank in the region; you give cash to a broker in one city, who communicates with a counterpart broker in another, and your relative collects the cash. Later, the brokers settle up between themselves. There is no wire transfer or formal documentation.

It means, for example, that a man in the Afghan diaspora who lives in London, Toronto, or suburban Virginia and has family networks still active back home and more cash than the local going rate, can fund the bride’s price from his living room and leave no trace that any institution would be concerned about.

The question nobody is asking

The buyers in this market share one thing across every category: nobody is looking for them. Coverage of Afghanistan’s child marriage crisis is overwhelmingly supply-side. How many girls. How poor the families. What the Taliban edicts say. The buyers, the men whose demand makes the market function, receive almost no scrutiny. No government in the region faces meaningful pressure to investigate or prosecute the purchase of Afghan girls. Western donors have not conditioned their aid or diplomatic engagement on it.

As services have disappeared following the aid collapse, families have increasingly resorted to early and forced marriage as a survival mechanism. But girls are not a coping mechanism. They are children being sold to men who want them, in a market with active buyers across multiple countries and continents, and the world is largely asking about everything except the demand.

The $3,200 figure tells half the story. The other half has names, addresses, and hawala contacts, and almost no one is reporting it.

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The attackers torched houses behind them as residents ran into the nearby fields and bush in the dark; eight children were among at least 30 people killed before the night was over.

Barnabas Aid and other groups monitoring the region say the gunfire continued into early morning with no security response ever reaching the village. What was left were multiple homes and shops burned to the ground.

One family lost five children in a single night; the sole survivor is now critically injured and fighting to live. Local monitoring group Truth Nigeria puts the real toll from coordinated attacks in the area above 60. A Nigerian Army post sat just a few miles off but never sent help while the attack was underway, and residents say the same community was hit in a similar raid around the same time last year.

Funeral services for 27 of the victims were held August 1 at a Catholic Mass in Kafanchan attended by thousands of mourners.

Chillingly, the slaughter at Naridon was not an isolated incident.

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Christa Gail Pike, 50, is set to die by lethal injection on September 30 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville — unless the governor intervenes at the eleventh hour. She’s spent nearly three decades on death row for a murder so gruesome that prosecutors told jurors she kept a piece of her victim’s skull as a trophy.

Now her fate rests in one man’s hands. Earlier this month, Pike’s legal team filed a clemency petition asking Mr. Lee to commute her sentence to life without parole — a call that, under Tennessee law, is his and his alone to make. It isn’t an attempt to rewrite what happened on that Knoxville hillside three decades ago, according to the attorney leading the fight to save her life.

“Commuting her sentence to life without possibility of parole does not absolve her of her guilt,” the attorney representing Christa Pike, Kelly Gleason, continues. “To the contrary, it would continue to hold her accountable for the remainder of her natural life.”

A Killing That Shocked Knoxville

According to court records, Pike lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer to a wooded stretch of the University of Tennessee’s agricultural campus in January 1995. Ms. Pike had convinced herself that Slemmer was flirting with her boyfriend, TaDaryl Shipp. All three were enrolled together at the Knoxville Job Corps, a federal training program for low-income teenagers.

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The research, published in the journal Communications Biology, examined cell-free DNA — fragments of genetic material, much of it shed from the placenta, that circulate in a pregnant woman’s bloodstream.

Scientists at University of California at Davis and partner institutions sequenced the full methylome of samples collected from 51 pregnancies between 36 and 41 weeks’ gestation, mapping the chemical tags that turn genes on and off without altering the DNA sequence itself.

Specific methylation patterns lined up with which children later received an autism diagnosis by age three, and many of those same patterns overlapped with changes tied to maternal obesity, a long-suspected but poorly explained risk factor for the disorder.

In other words, a single vial of a pregnant woman’s blood in her final trimester may already contain faint chemical footprints of how her baby’s brain is developing, footprints that, in this study, showed up more often in children later diagnosed with autism.

A professor and molecular epidemiologist at UC Davis, Rebecca Schmidt, tells me that the findings offer a preliminary but real signal.

“There might be markers associated with the child’s future neurodevelopmental outcomes, like autism, that can be found in maternal blood during late pregnancy,” Ms. Schmidt said.

So, what does a finding like this actually change for doctors, and for the families waiting years for answers?

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It’s always there, quietly, in case. Until it’s not.

This summer, for only the second time in its history, the American Red Cross declared a full national blood crisis. Type O reserves, the blood used in the most life-threatening emergencies, the blood delivery rooms reach for when a birth goes sideways, have fallen below a single day’s supply nationwide.

Nobody is talking about what that means for mothers and babies. So let’s talk about it.

Why type O matters the moment a birth turns

Postpartum hemorrhage causes roughly 11 percent of maternal deaths in the United States, and it is the single leading cause of death occurring on the actual day of birth. It can escalate in minutes.

A mother who is stable during delivery can lose a life-threatening volume of blood shortly after, often before anyone fully understands why. In those moments, there is no time to run a match. Clinicians reach for O negative, the universal donor type, because it’s the one blood type that can go into anyone immediately.

O positive, meanwhile, can be transfused into roughly 80 percent of patients and makes up about 60 percent of everything the Red Cross distributes nationwide, a supply that blood banks used to cushion with a five-day reserve. That cushion is gone. The national blood supply fell by roughly 25 percent in a single month this summer, even as hospitals pulled thousands more units a week than expected.

A single traumatic delivery, like a single car accident victim, can require dozens of units of blood. There is no substitute. As one blood bank medical director told me for a related piece, “we have no feasible alternatives to blood components” — donated blood is still, in 2026, the only thing standing between a hemorrhaging mother and catastrophe.

It isn’t only mothers

Newborns in the NICU are among the most fragile transfusion recipients in any hospital. Premature infants often need small, precise blood transfusions to survive their first days, and unlike adults, they have almost no margin for delay or substitution. A shortage that forces hospitals to ration and prioritize hits the smallest patients hardest, because there is no elective version of a NICU transfusion. It happens now, or the outcome changes.

Cesarean sections, too, are surgeries, and hospitals under blood strain have already begun the first line of defense: postponing elective procedures to preserve supply for true emergencies. A scheduled C-section is not usually classified as elective in the way a knee replacement is. Still, the broader strain on surgical blood reserves touches every corner of a maternity ward, from a routine delivery that turns complicated to a NICU transfer that needed matched blood an hour ago.

Part of what’s driving this shortage is almost mundane: high schools and colleges, which supply roughly 20 percent of the nation’s blood through campus drives, go dark every summer. Add extreme heat, poor air quality, and a wave of foodborne illness keeping even willing donors home, and you get the lowest summer donation total in four years, coming at the exact moment hospitals need more, not less.

The Red Cross says it isn’t fully resolved. Officials maintain that just three additional donors at each remaining blood drive nationwide could stabilize the supply.

I think about this every time I remember the hours after Rumi was born — how ordinary the room felt, how invisible the machinery of readiness was, right up until the moment it might not have been. Most mothers never need that bag of blood hanging quietly nearby. But many do. And right now, for the first time in years, it might not be there.

If you’ve given blood before, you’re eligible again sooner than you think. If you haven’t, a maternity ward somewhere is counting on you to find twenty minutes this week.

— Hollie

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The caller told authorities that the former transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, had confessed years earlier at a conference in Alabama to committing what the caller described as unspeakable violent crimes against children.

Within days, Mr. Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, were separated from their 4-year-old twins overnight. The children were taken for forensic interviews without either parent present, and Mr. Buttigieg later wrote that he counted the 24 hours until they were returned among the darkest hours of his life.

Michigan State Police confirmed they had received an anonymous report and, alongside Child Protective Services, responded and determined the report had no basis in truth. Mr. Buttigieg, writing on Substack, called it a “cruel, politically motivated hoax” — an accusation invented from nothing, delivered by a stranger, and believed just long enough to upend his household.

At first glance, it looks like political theater, the kind of thing that happens to a man with a national profile and enemies who know how to use it. Yet the story is really about a system that runs on unverified tips every day, grinding through false or unproven allegations for families who have no public profile and no press corps to speak up for them.

If it can happen to a former Cabinet secretary with lawyers, resources, and a platform of millions, what happens to the families who have none of that?

“Allegations from anonymous sources are confirmed by CPS at the lowest rate of all reporter types, just 10 percent are confirmed nationwide,” an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, Kelley Fong, tells me.

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The horrific fate of those children has been lost in all of this. They are the true victims, and those beautiful kids did not deserve any of this.

I’ve spent the last several weeks reporting this case for The New York Sun — tracking testimony, calling psychiatrists, reading transcripts until the words stopped making sense. In that time I’ve watched the internet split itself into two furious camps, one insisting Lindsay Clancy is a monster who doesn’t deserve an ounce of sympathy, the other insisting she’s a victim of a system that poisoned her and then abandoned her.

I want to say something that apparently isn’t allowed anymore, on either side of that argument: multiple things can be true at once.

It is true that Lindsay Clancy horribly killed her children. She does not dispute this. She strangled them with exercise bands in her own home, then tried to end her own life. That is not in question, was never in question, and nothing I write here is an attempt to soften it or explain it away. She murdered her own children.

It is also true that prosecutors have laid out a version of events that is genuinely hard to grapple with, that this wasn’t a woman lost to psychiatric collapse but someone who allegedly asked her husband to run errands so she could have time being alone with the kids, and who researched how long he’d be gone. If that’s accurate, it argues for calculation, not chaos.

And it is also true, by every clinical account I’ve gathered, that something catastrophic may have been happening inside her mind in the days before.

Dr. Jennifer Payne, who studies this at the University of Virginia, describes postpartum psychosis as a kind of “delirium or confusion” that “can wax and wane,” meaning a woman evaluated during a lucid stretch can look composed. At the same time, she is, underneath, dangerously unwell. Ms. Clancy was reportedly prescribed as many as twelve medications in the months before the killings, from multiple providers who, by every account, weren’t coordinating.

All of these things can be true simultaneously, and a jury’s inability to reconcile them isn’t a failure of twelve ordinary people. It’s a reflection of how unprepared our entire system — legal, medical, cultural — is to hold this much complexity about mothers, mental illness, and violence in the same breath.

But here’s what still isn’t being said clearly enough: three children do not get to weigh in on the debate. Cora will never start kindergarten. Dawson will never turn four. Callan never made it to his first birthday. They are, in all of this, the quietest voices in the room, and I think that says something ugly about the rest of us. We have made this a referendum on one woman’s mental state, and three actual children have been reduced to a footnote in an argument about culpability.

Ms. Clancy deserves to face the full weight of the law for what she did. But that alone isn’t enough. If we don’t also push to keep this from happening again, we’ve failed everyone this case is supposed to be about.

Beyond postpartum psychosis specifically, we are not talking nearly enough, in this country, about mental illness generally — the broader, chronically underfunded, poorly coordinated mess of American mental health care, where a mother can be in visible crisis in front of a multitude of professionals, and none of them are required to speak to one another. No case manager stitches those providers together, no single person whose job it is to see the whole picture.

I keep returning to this: punching a fist in the air and refusing to look at what potentially contributed to this tragedy protects no one. It doesn’t protect Cora, Dawson, or Callan, who are already gone. It fails every mother spiraling in silence right now, and every child not yet born who will inherit whatever gaps we refuse to close today.

The system can do better. I don’t want another child to die because it didn’t. This is bigger than the Clancy case.

We owe those kids more than a hashtag war over whether their mother deserves our sympathy. We owe them a system that might have caught this before three small coffins became the cost of finding out it didn’t.

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That’s the story I want to tell you today, and why the timing is critical.

What is actually happening inside North Korea right now

Amnesty International published new testimony earlier this year from North Korean defectors. In Yanggang Province, authorities executed high school students for watching Squid Game. In Sinuiju, authorities once summoned tens of thousands of residents, children among them, to watch a public execution tied to South Korean media. Defectors say being marched to watch a killing is standard practice, framed to children as “ideological education.”

One escapee, Kim Eunju, said that she was taken to these executions herself as a teenager in the 1990s and 2000s: “People were executed for watching or distributing South Korean media.”

This isn’t old news. A 2020 North Korean law made owning or sharing South Korean film, television, or K-pop a crime punishable by hard labor or death. What has happened since then?

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The hospital, opened after the 2021 coup, provides free treatment to displaced families, including surgery and cancer care. Its doctors relied on the Starlink connection to reach specialists who were otherwise inaccessible — the kind of remote consult that, for a pregnant woman with a complicated delivery or a child with a treatable infection, is the difference between a phone call and a funeral.

Its founder, Ko Htoo, chose Starlink specifically because it runs on its own satellite network, entirely outside the junta’s grid and out of reach of the military’s shutdowns. Now the dish on the roof is just hardware.

That is the quieter side of a policy fight most of the world will only recognize as a billing dispute.

A new global limit on Starlink’s Roam Unlimited plan means any terminal used outside its registered home country for more than 30 consecutive days will stop working unless its owner pays for a costlier plan, moves the account to the country where it is actually being used, or physically carries the hardware across a border.

For business travelers, that is an inconvenience. For hundreds of thousands of displaced mothers, children, doctors, and resistance fighters across Burma, it is something closer to a countdown clock.

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A year ago, Ryan and I took Raven to Marrakech, Morocco, to visit friends, to ride camels at dusk and marvel at spices in the souk. I felt, for the first time in months, the serrated edges of my earlier summer miscarriage grief begin to unravel. In the ancient city’s oldest madrassa, with sunlight pouring through carved archways, the severing came.

My body collapsed into sobs I could not contain and hadn’t even sensed were waiting. The surrender was sudden and undeniable. I started, very slowly, to sift through the weeds for the faith that glues the world together when the fault lines emerge.

You can read more about that trip here.

There, wrapped in the Sufi spirit and the warmth of the sun, something in me stilled. I didn’t pray for another child, though I wanted one so desperately. I prayed gratitude instead, for what I already had. It was the reminder I needed: to accept and embrace every blessing already given before asking God for more.

I had enough. But the best was yet to come.

If only I had known then that in less than a year I would be cradling my second child in the crook of my arm. Yet the point, I think, was not to know. It was to surrender to the present wholeheartedly. And that, above all, is what I am trying to take with me now as the days grow steadily shorter and my baby grows from that curled creature of the womb into an open-eyed infant, alert and sensing her place in this world.

I emerged from my postpartum cocoon a little more this past week, having reached the six-week, or forty-day, milestone where you visit the doctor in hopes of “clearance” to do many things I had missed — from taking bubble baths to morning runs to wading in the pool at sunset.

I left my appointment both relieved and broken-hearted. Relieved knowing that I did it, that it is done, and simultaneously saddened that the birthing chapter of my life has come to its beautiful end. We feel very complete with our two darling girls, and I understand that my role now is to nurture and guide them.

However, there is still a kind of grief in accepting that, for all the anxiety I weathered ahead of every appointment, test, and ultrasound, I will never again experience the same routine care and attentiveness from my doctor and midwife, or the excitement of pushing an incredible creation earthside. I realize I am one of the fortunate ones, that not every woman has the positive experience I have had both times, where I feel seen and listened to.

I am also one of the perhaps select few who relished (almost) every moment of the pregnancy journey and carried through the surrender I found in Marrakech. Carrying a child is absolute surrender and growth in its purest form.

I found myself returning repeatedly throughout those nine months to Thomas Dorsey’s “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” a gospel that came from his own devastation, written after he lost his wife and newborn son in the same terrible week.

Yet something in those rich words reached past the apprehension of a past loss and graced the part of me that already knew: there was nothing left to control. The outcome was not mine to determine. All I can do is walk the path. And to walk it, I had to let go of the grip entirely, the white-knuckled need to manage, monitor and protect against the unprotectable.

“Precious Lord, Take My Hand” pulled me toward the notion that I did not have to do this alone — yet accepting that higher power’s guidance required a complete and conscious surrender.

Some mornings that surrender lasted an hour. Some days it lasted only a few minutes before the fear of something going wrong crept back. Only, I kept returning to the gospel. Over and over, for nine months. Take my hand. Lead me on. Let me stand. Guide my feet. Hold my hand.

Then, the birth itself: encircled by kind faces, holding your hand, devoted to your needs, ensuring you and baby come out of this alive. That level of nurturing brought me back to a feeling I’ve had many times before in war zones, working with “fixers,” essentially locals who help us with stories, meetings, and translation, but many of whom I came to consider family.

From Syria to Afghanistan to Iraq to Sudan and beyond, my fixers were the fiercest of protectors, who I spent weeks and months with, who became the family I did not have in my “normal” American life as I stampeded the world with a lonely, unwavering independence.

A war zone instantly draws us close to those we entrust our lives to — the locals around us. And in many ways, the birthing experience, from the first appointment to cradling a tiny soul, rekindled that same sensation of community, of love, of those around you keeping you here, keeping you alive.

Now, forty-plus days on, a new page is opening. The sacred forty days of insulation and baby bonding emanate across cultures, from the Chinese zuo yuezi to the Latin American cuarentena to the traditions of the Middle East and South Asia. It is a time when the mother is meant to be supported by her village, to be fed and held and given carte blanche to cuddle, heal and rest.

There is something incredibly special about the forty-day mark, beyond the postpartum portal. Lent lasts forty days. Rain fell for forty days and nights in the Great Flood. The Arbaeen Shia pilgrimage to Karbala occurs forty days after Ashura. The Sufi seclusion practice for spiritual purification lasts forty days, as do the mourning rites in Hindu and Islamic traditions.

A Pashtun Afghan friend, Abdul, once sat with me on the concrete floor of his wooden home in Kandahar after the passing of his beloved grandmother. It pained me to see an Afghan man, so gentle in his demeanor, with a voice that resembled that of a songbird. Abdul unfolded his hands and explained his tribe’s mourning ritual each time a loved one passed.

“We cry and mourn for forty days,” he said softly. “And then on the forty-first day, the sun rises again.”

For those forty days, the family avoids social gatherings and only wears black. Elders come and go from the humble living room, expressing their grief, and neighborhood women pass by with bags of sugar and wheat as a token of their condolences. The Afghan family chants and wails, their sobs echoing down the lonely dirt path outside. For forty days, life stops.

But then, the time to grieve comes to a definitive end. And life goes on. Life must go on.

So, we look forward. Here’s to surrendering to new chapters, to new horizons and boldly walking toward that cracked door.

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A yolk sac takes shape. An outer layer destined to become a placenta wraps around the rest. Two weeks in, the cluster has arranged itself, component by component, into something that looks remarkably like an embryo freshly lodged in a womb, and it secretes the hormone that turns a pregnancy test positive. Nothing here was conceived. It was constructed.

Earlier this year, a sprawling group of the world’s leading developmental biologists did something rare for a field running at full tilt.

Led by Dr. Alfonso Martinez Arias of Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona and co-signed by more than 40 researchers spanning a dozen countries, they published a white paper, “Human Stem Cell-Based Embryo Models: Innovation, Ethics, and Policy,” in the journal Human Reproduction, calling for the rules they themselves have been working without.

It leaves the law facing a question it has no answer for: at what point does a replica of a human embryo stop being a replica?

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Mirza told me he scrounged, saved, begged, borrowed. By the time he had the money, he called again, and the price had doubled.

“I couldn’t afford it,” he said, with a look so lost it ripped through me. “I couldn’t afford to save her.”

I wanted to help him. I couldn’t. Under U.S. law, fundraising for Mirza could have been construed as material support to a foreign terrorist organization. He lost contact with the enslaver not long after. He never learned whether his children would see their mother again.

I remember the way the gentle rain sifted through the splinters in the canopy, holes left by mortars and by madmen. Mirza held himself together through that helplessness. I was the one who fell apart.

I have written the Yazidis’ stories many times since. You can print and reprint that suffering over and over, and still there’s always the one that breaks you, the one that makes you understand, in your body and not just your notebook, what it means to be poor and powerless against the forces of evil. Mirza was mine.

And I haven’t stopped pondering the question since: are some human lives worth more than others? Do some lives just count more than others?

History keeps forcing us to answer it, whether we want to or not.

When war breaks out, lines get drawn fast. The people on one side become “us.” The people on the other become “them.” It’s a psychological game, reinforced by propaganda, nationalism and fear. But it also does something dangerous. It erodes empathy. Slowly, some lives start to feel like they matter less than others. Somewhere, a man like Mirza becomes a footnote instead of a father.

It is civilians and children who pay the harshest price. A report is compiled by tallying the dead, and keyboard warriors get on social media to rebuff and inflame. It doesn’t matter how a statistic is presented; viewers lose nothing.

Social media was supposed to fix some of this. Instead, people scroll past a massacre to get to a birthday video, and nobody thinks twice about it anymore, or worse, they celebrate it. There’s more footage now than there’s ever been — more raw material coming out of Yemen or Gaza or Sudan or Afghanistan or Burma or wherever the camera happens to be pointed that week.

None of it matters much if the algorithm decides outrage travels better than grief, which it does, every time. I’ve watched a single image define a war for people who never read past the caption. Thousands of individual stories, and somehow it’s always the same two or three that make it into anyone’s feed.

Psychologists call this in-group bias: the instinct to favor people we see as “ours” and to feel suspicious of, or indifferent to, everyone else. In wartime, that instinct turns toxic. People stop being people. They become symbols — or collateral damage.

Moral disengagement is the technical term for it. It just means that people find a way to live with harm they’d otherwise oppose. I’ve seen it happen to soldiers, officials and people who have never left their homes. Nobody has to feel responsible for what happens to “the other.”

None of this means a country is wrong to prioritize its own citizens. In an ideal world, that’s simply what governments do; they put their own first. But too few countries hold up that end of the bargain, and the burden falls unevenly on the rest of the world to fill the gap. That imbalance is frustrating, sure; however, it isn’t a reason to stop extending empathy. Empathy isn’t rationed the same way love isn’t a finite sentiment. We have exactly as much of it as we’re willing to give.

Confirmation bias plays a role in all of this. We seek out information that supports what we already believe and dismiss what doesn’t, often without realizing it. Distance plays a role too: the further removed we are from someone’s life or culture, the easier it is to see them as “other.” We sympathize fastest with people who look and live like us. Empires and armies have used exactly this mechanism to justify atrocities for as long as there’s been war.

Yet the same tools that deepen division from global communication to social media, can also close that divide, if we use them deliberately and carefully.

**

I don’t know what happened to Mirza. I don’t know if he ever found his wife or made peace with a world that priced her at $30,000 and then doubled the cost when he finally scraped it together. I think about him more than almost anyone I’ve met in fourteen countries of war.

If there’s an answer, maybe it’s just this: don’t look away. Mirza’s rain fell like any rain. His loss was as painful as anyone else’s. The lives of children, all children, matter.

The day we forget that, we’ve already lost the argument.

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Chillingly, she is not the only mother to have done something so horrific and incomprehensible. And she will not be the last.

Now, weeks into her murder trial in Plymouth County, the jury has to decide whether Clancy was so consumed by postpartum psychosis that she didn’t understand what she was doing.

But how does a mother get this sick, in front of this many doctors?

If anything, this heart wrenching case spotlights a gaping hole in the medical sector.

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The Taliban delegation, representing a government whose two top leaders face active ICC arrest warrants, had just been let in the front door of the bloc that spent five years denouncing its treatment of women. This same government presides over a collapse of basic services that is now starving its own children.

The World Food Program warned on August 4 that conflict, unemployment, rising food prices, and disrupted supply chains are pushing humanitarian needs higher across Afghanistan, and that aid reductions have already shuttered health centers and cut off vulnerable children from critical nutrition services.

Yet even as the humanitarian picture darkens, Brussels opened diplomatic doors to the men running the country.

Here’s why.

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Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan August 2021

On August 14, 2021, I wake before my alarm on a Saturday morning, a sobbing mess, hungover with anxiety. The body, I quickly learn, never lies. My photographer, Jake Simkin, and I meander through the oddly empty Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif. The city’s dynamism has been stripped into shuttered stalls as hundreds line up outside the banks, a last-ditch bid to withdraw whatever cash they can to head somewhere else.

There is no longer a way out for us. A rare breeze wafts through the typically static air, carrying something ominous. Frightened families stuff themselves and their belongings into tiny, intricately colored rickshaws, retreating into the city center as their homes on the periphery come under threat. Under a scorching sun, shops are closed, and cars and construction equipment lie abandoned.

Around midday, Jake and I jump into a cab and drive toward what we presume to be the sandbagged front lines, where Afghan and resistance forces are putting up the fight of their lives. There are no signs of fighting.

“I’m scared,” the cab driver unexpectedly croaks. “I don’t want to go any further.”

Our interpreter, Hami, still on his Nokia flip phone, turns to us in the backseat.

“The Taliban has just broken through the first of the three front lines,” he blurts out with a bizarre smile, either out of secret pleasure or to appease my unease. “We are surrounded.”

I return to my hotel room, making call after call. I lie and tell my worried parents I am not near Mazar, which they hear on the news is on the verge of Taliban control. Still, every Afghan government and military official I speak to tells me the city will not fall, at least not for many more days.

The clock ticks, each second stretched thin, refusing to move fast enough toward whatever comes next. We venture out for Afghan street kebabs. After all, it is a Saturday night. Upon leaving our hotel, we are met by pitch-black skies and barren streets illuminated only by a faint crescent moon. We eat quickly, pulling hunks of fatty beef and liver off long metal skewers, noting that the kebab café down a dozen crooked steps is silent, empty, and unusual. Our favorite basement kebab café has never been silent before.

“That Spidey sense,” Jake utters, his voice trailing off.

We forgo our food, throw some money on the table, and head toward the hotel as quickly as possible. In the stifling summer night air, gunfire crackles. My fast walk becomes a run as motorbikes roar closer and closer behind. With my fingers gripping the back of Jake’s shirt, I thrust my body through the blast-proof doors of the ornate, towering hotel overlooking Mazar-e-Sharif.

Everything I think I know about war disappears from my graveyard of memories. I don’t know anything. I do not know what will come. I text a friend in Southern California.

“It’s falling,” I write, my hands shaking as I hurry to the roof in time to watch the Taliban swarm what was supposed to be the bulwark of resistance below. “It’s fallen.”

When I ask him if I will make it out, seeking any semblance of reassurance from a world far away, he says he does not know.

The Taliban’s celebratory gunfire intensifies. Jake and I move away from the glass windows. As a precaution, the hotel staff asks that we avoid taking pictures out of caution that our phones and cameras might be mistaken for weapons. These young staffers bring me warm green tea and assure me I am safe, despite their pinched faces and listless eyes. They’re lying. They don’t know. Nevertheless, I trust these staffers whose names I do not know, in a place where it is hard to find trust.

A message flashes across my phone announcing the cancellation of my flight back to Kabul, scheduled for two days later. The vibration on my phone will not stop. Media outlets are looking for stories. I am now the story, and I do not want to be the story. In this confusing moment, it feels as though the outside world knows more about what is happening in the clouded streets below than I do. I’m trapped inside an isolated, burning bubble. Far away in Australia, my father leaves another voicemail. In the wake of news reports stating Mazar has fallen, he nervously asks again where I am.

Subconsciously wishing I could return to the infantile state of having someone else take care of me, I curl into a fetal position on the wooden floor. It is the color of walnuts, and I fixate on whether I will crack walnuts at Christmas. I always crack walnuts at Christmas. Will I be able to this Christmas? Just for a moment, I am a child who wants someone else, someone older and stronger, to take her out of this unforeseen mess. We are never too old to miss our parents. How had I not comprehended that the city would fall so quickly? I should have known better than to be here. Why was I even here?

I came to Afghanistan again to forget the American life with Uber, air-conditioning, and Sprite Zero, the cozy American life that did not feel like mine, the life once stuffed with celebrities and Hollywood heavyweights and Malibu soirees, Oscars, Grammys, cigar bars with Wall Street powerplayers and egos that could not be deflated. I returned for the forgotten. The small voices. To not forget the small voices. Is anybody there? Could anybody hear them? The ones wrapped in war after war after war? That is why I am here. Some say you should travel only to return home and find your center again. Home, at this point of my life, doesn’t really exist. It is here, in the core of bedlam, that I feel most like myself.

Just like that, in an ordinary moment, the extraordinary city inside a country I had come to love plunges into a medieval, concrete morass I no longer recognize. The takeover is complete, but the earth continues. I snap my eyes open. I’m still on the glass-encased rooftop, and the Taliban is still below. I bounce up and onto wobbly feet.

In a calm and collected manner, Jake and I creep back down to the seventh floor. We lock the blast-proof door behind us. And we wait.

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Share Maternal Dispatches with Hollie McKay

They weren’t. Not really.

A study published this year in the New England Journal of Medicine has quietly dismantled one of the most foundational assumptions in American obstetric medicine.

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