Lindsay Clancy does not dispute that she killed her children. In January 2023, in the family’s Massachusetts home, Cora, five, Dawson, three, and eight-month-old Callan were strangled. Clancy then attempted suicide in the way that family annihilators commonly do, and survived, paralyzed below the waist. At her murder trial she rolled to the defense table each morning in a wheelchair. The six-week proceeding ended on 4 September in a hung jury: eleven jurors accepted the defense’s argument that she was in the grip of acute postpartum psychosis and could not be held legally responsible, while one juror, a man, told the judge he had “reasonable doubt” about her culpability and then refused to apply it as the law requires.
Moira Donegan’s column for the Guardian is less interested in the deadlock than in what the case was made to carry. Once a story like this is witnessed en masse — through social media, in fragments, with the family photographs running above the fold — it becomes a referendum on things larger than itself. In this instance: on motherhood, on mental-health care, and on the status of women.
The exception got the attention
The uncomfortable arithmetic is that family annihilation has a pattern, and it is overwhelmingly male. The killings are typically carried out by a husband and father, often on the verge of bankruptcy or divorce, usually as the finale of a long reign of domestic violence; about half the time the perpetrator kills himself afterwards. A striking share of what gets counted as mass shootings in the United States are these killings inside the home. The Clancy case drew the coverage it did precisely because the killer was the mother — the exception, not the rule, is what the cameras came for.
That inversion is what made the case available to two very different readings. Some mothers recognised Clancy’s postpartum crisis and wanted the attention to produce something: better care for the rare but acute illness that seems to have overtaken her. Others on the misogynist right treated her actions, and the sympathy she attracted, as evidence about women as such.
Ordinary failures
Donegan’s argument is that the second reading is a projection, and that the first badly understates the case. If the right imagines every woman as a potential Lindsay Clancy, she writes, it is because “on some level, they know that what our culture asks mothers to do is unsustainable, cruel, and often quite literally maddening.”
What she finds haunting is not the strangeness of the case but the ordinariness of the failures that led to it. Clancy had a history of postpartum psychological distress after the births of her first two children, in 2017 and 2019, and was treated for it. After Callan’s birth in 2022, what followed was different in kind: she could not sleep or eat, was hit by bouts of sudden terror, and could barely function. A series of providers issued her an array of psychiatric medications, escalating to powerful tranquilizers as her sleeplessness continued. More than a month before the killings she reported hallucinations, kept asking for help, told her mother and her husband that she feared she would harm her children. She was briefly admitted as an inpatient and left after a few nights; longer hospitalisation appears to have been treated as out of the question, because she had children to look after. By the end she was hearing voices.
Nothing in that sequence required malice or negligence of a dramatic kind. It required only the ordinary assumptions: that a woman living in relative comfort cannot be suffering very much; that a mother’s disappearance into the family is normal; that women will persevere through their own agony because their children need them to; that the “baby blues” are a mood and not, sometimes, a psychotic break.
What the case is being asked to decide
The retrial question now hangs over everyone involved, including the children’s father and grandparents. And the dispute itself is real, not a media artifact: whether postpartum psychosis existed in Clancy’s case at the severity the defence claims is exactly the kind of question a jury is badly equipped to settle, in a system where the illness is still poorly understood and unevenly diagnosed.
That is the shape of Donegan’s claim. The verdict is a Rorschach test. The failure that produced the tragedy was banal.