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Lindsay Clancy committed the worst crime imaginable when she killed her three children.
She was disturbingly methodical about it, tying an exercise band to a door in the basement of the family home and strangling each of her babies, Cora, then 5, Dawson, then three, and Callan, then just seven months, one at a time.
How did she not stop, when they must have protested with fear and incomprehension?
And then, even more disturbingly, left her three children — her youngest son not yet dead — alone in the last moments of their desperately short lives, as she went upstairs to try and take her own life.
The only explanation is that she is a monster, of course.
Or perhaps it isn’t.
In the mass of social discourse, it’s impossible to miss that many women — especially mothers — do not accept that Clancy constructed a perfect-seeming life only to deliberately destroy it.
Instead, they believe that while Clancy’s crime was heinous, it was a tragedy caused by a horrific health system failure.
To those women, Clancy isn’t a poster girl, or a hero, or even a collective sainted “victim.” She is the living, breathing embodiment of every one of their greatest fears.
This opinion has exploded chat forums on sites like Reddit, motivating women to share their own postpartum stories and traumas. It’s even driven hundreds of women to gather (perhaps misguidedly) outside the courtroom in which Clancy is being tried to offer their support.
But to criticize these women who support Clancy — and who do not seek to transfer victimhood away from her children and onto her — is to fundamentally misunderstand what women are trying to say about this case.
There are no children without mothers. And if we do not center and protect mothers and care for them better and with more urgency, we risk endangering more families.
Suicide is now the leading cause of death for postpartum women in the US, according to the most recent national data.
And many women who have given birth, myself included, know the precipice on which our mental health stands after giving birth.
How terrifyingly easy it can be to untether from reality. How fast a mental health crisis can take hold in the throes of postpartum. How even a so-called “easy” postpartum is wrought with anxiety, insomnia, panic attacks, constant tears and neurosis.
How hard it is to get help, because so little infrastructure — and true, deep medical research — exists.
While the unusually dangerous postpartum psychosis Clancy was diagnosed with by her current healthcare team is rare, postpartum depression and anxiety are not.
One in seven women experience it after childbirth — with a key symptom being disturbing thoughts of harming themselves or their children.
It is terrifyingly triggering for some to watch Clancy’s court case unfold. A woman who completely lost touch with reality, who acted on the very worst and most heinous of her instincts and now heaves and sobs and breaks down, tortured unendingly by the evilness of her crime.
I wouldn’t call what I — or many other women — feel for Clancy sympathy. There is little forgiveness to be had. But there is a certain kind of empathy, rooted in our own experiences and fears, that there by the grace of G-d go us.
I am aware, of course, that many people — men especially — have argued that when men murder their families no one rushes to excuse their actions with a mental health defense, as Clancy is doing.
It’s a double standard that doesn’t, and perhaps shouldn’t, stand up.
Yet here so many of us women are.
The difference, I believe, in Clancy’s case is that she was a woman so clearly begging for help from the healthcare system, and yet not being cared for adequately.
She had knowledge, as a labor and delivery nurse. She and her then-husband Patrick had financial resources, and she had immense family support.
She knew who to call, and she did. Again and again and again.
And still, her care appeared piecemeal and disjointed and inadequate.
As a mother myself, it is hard to listen to the prosecution and defense case and not feel that Clancy was a woman who knew she was having a crisis — and was monumentally failed.
It’s hard to believe that a cold-blooded, cruel and evil murderer — as the prosecutors allege she is — would be begging for help, as Clancy did numerous times to her husband, her parents and professionals.
A ruthless killer wouldn’t have confessed, as Clancy did, to her mother that she feared voices telling her to harm her children.
A sociopathic murderer wouldn’t have begged to be admitted to hospital to try and “fix” herself, or called up doctors and women’s postpartum services — only to be turned away.
A woman bent on suffocating her children no matter what wouldn’t have been trying to prevent the very terrible thing she ended up doing from happening.
Of course she is not blameless. She will live with the consequences of her terrible actions for the rest of her life.
The victims remain the children, not Clancy.
But many women, while not forgiving her, see three children whose lives could and should have been saved. They see a woman who was abandoned — and who could have been them.
They want the system to change.
And they see a monstrous tragedy. But perhaps not the deliberately, intentionally evil actions of a monster.
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