Is Lindsay Clancy a victim, a killer or both?

Brett Kavanaugh vs. Christine Blasey Ford. Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard. Man vs. bear. It seems like at least once every election cycle, some hotly contested feud emerges as something of a Rorschach test to divide the citizenry straight down the middle, often along gender lines.

That’s exactly what Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial seems to be doing this week. For those of you who’ve somehow miraculously managed to avoid the fray, Lindsay Clancy is a Massachusetts mother who strangled her three young children in 2023 and then attempted suicide, leaving herself paralyzed.

The killings themselves aren’t largely disputed, though a number of my friends are deeply convinced that she was framed by her husband. As not even Clancy’s own defense team has taken that angle, and as her own mother believes Lindsay killed her children, it’s not a theory I will entertain in the span of this blog, though I’m sure my comments section will be full of those who are very angry with me for my failure to do so.

In any case, Clancy’s trial is largely about criminal responsibility. Prosecutors say she deliberately murdered her children, while her defense says severe postpartum psychosis left her unable to fully comprehend the gravity of what she was doing.

The national reaction has become strikingly sexed because many women see the case through the lens of childbirth, postpartum mental illness, sleep deprivation and a maternal-health system they believe failed a woman who repeatedly sought help. Conversely, many men see those explanations as an attempt to excuse a mother for murdering three defenseless children. Excuses, excuses, excuses.

The loudest pro-Clancy voices tend to be mothers and maternal-mental-health advocates emphasizing psychosis and failed care, while some of the loudest opposition has come from conservative male commentators who emphasize agency, evil and equal accountability.

As is often the case in these situations, the conversation has stopped being about Clancy at all but has come to represent a broader, longer war between the sexes. One side hears, “Women are making excuses for women,” while the other hears, “Men who have never experienced childbirth are using an extraordinarily rare psychiatric catastrophe as evidence that women as an entire sex class are irrational, unaccountable or unfit for equal civic power.”

Yes, there are a ton of men on the internet claiming that the volume of women defending Clancy is further justification of their belief that women are too emotionally disturbed to be trusted with the vote. And the women insisting, “This could absolutely happen to any of us,” while raising close to a million dollars for what is essentially Lindsay’s defense fund are certainly not helping!

Though the case intersects with a number of my personal passions and interests, I’ve got to admit that I found myself largely avoiding the deep dive. For one thing, I’ve got limited emotional reserves, and I’m protective of them. For another, weeding through cognitive dissonance is a lot of work. Holding truths in tension is a lot of work. Finding truth and justice in the middle of competing narratives and extenuating circumstances is a lot of work, and it often seems it’s thankless work to boot, so I just wasn’t up for the internal wrestling match.

I’m also a huge fan of inviting people to stay in their lanes of expertise. I don’t trust unearned confidence. In fact, it often annoys me greatly, so I’ve wanted to be careful not to invite people toward opinions that haven’t been weighed and tested against science or complete evidence and data. I’m not a doctor or a mental health specialist. With that lengthy disclaimer out of the way, please understand that the rest of what you’re about to read is strictly my opinion, as weighed against my understanding of God’s standards to the best of my ability.

Here are a few truths I think are important to extract from the whole disaster:

1. The primary victims in this story are Lindsay Clancy’s children.

Everything else in this piece — the theology, the politics, the arguments about hormones and agency — is secondary to that fact. Three children are dead. Whatever framework anyone lands on for understanding how that happened, it does not change who paid for it. Men are not the victims. Women are not the victims. Lindsay Clancy is not the victim. Those poor sweet babies are the victims.

2. Postpartum depression is real, despite what a number of blowhard conservative men are insisting.

I watched one popular commentator put scare quotes around the word “depression,” as though the exhaustion and despair that follow childbirth are a character flaw born of selfishness rather than a well-documented physiological event. Another dismissed it as ingratitude and lack of perspective.

Ain’t nobody got time for this degree of ignorance. If Republicans want to aggressively alienate their most consistently faithful female voter base (married middle-aged women), this is a surefire way to do it.

This is the opposite of what’s needed here.

3. Postpartum psychosis is also real, though rare. It is NOT the same as postpartum depression. They are completely different critters, and conflating the two is dangerous.

Here’s where I have to get candid with the well-intended, self-identified “empath” females in my circles. Please, for the love of mercy, sisters, stop insisting that “Lindsay Clancy is all of us” or that “This could absolutely happen to anybody.”

No, it couldn’t, and no, it doesn’t. Even for the rare women who do fully develop postpartum psychosis, it’s only a tiny percentage of them who go on to cause physical harm to their children. The figure commonly cited in psychiatric literature is about 4% for untreated PPP, meaning roughly 96% do not commit infanticide. And at least one major review argues that even that 4% estimate substantially overstates the actual risk.

Childbirth produces enormous hormonal changes in virtually every mother, but postpartum psychosis occurs in only about 0.1–0.2% of deliveries. That alone tells us that the hormonal transition is a trigger in a small susceptible minority, not something that renders women generally vulnerable to psychosis. This has to matter, especially in a world that’s increasingly eager to write women off as unhinged, unstable and untrustworthy as a sex class.

As a sex, we’ve only recently transcended the pseudoscientific stigma of “hysteria” and the “wandering womb.”

I have no interest in helping drag us back to a place where female hormones get treated as an insurmountable force capable of overriding a woman’s moral agency altogether, as though we’re helpless passengers in our own bodies. That instinct only serves to infantilize us, and it hands ammunition to the very men who already suspect we can’t be trusted with full civic participation, let alone a voice at church. We can acknowledge diminished capacity without pretending agency no longer exists within it or that we’re all equally susceptible to violent madness.

4. Diminished capacity is not an excuse to murder anyone, and asking hard questions about culpability is not the same as excusing it.

Diminished capacity might explain the “how.” It does not rewrite the “what.” Three children are dead either way, and no diagnosis reverses that.

Lindsay Clancy tried to get help. There is substantial evidence of that. She voluntarily admitted herself to McLean Hospital after experiencing suicidal thoughts and, according to her husband, thoughts of harming her children. But the clinicians treating her at McLean were apparently not told she intended to harm her children. Her records reflected suicidal and intrusive thoughts but no psychosis, and by the time she was discharged, she denied both suicidal intent and thoughts of harming others. Her doctors assessed her as a low or minimal safety risk and discharged her after five days. Mental health professionals can only take extraordinary preventative measures based on the danger they can reasonably identify.

As a Christian, I believe there are moments when actual evil descends on real human vulnerability and exploits it. I also believe we carry an obligation to resist it, even then. That’s an unpopular claim to make, sure. But it is, nevertheless, what I believe to be true.

Whether Clancy bears full criminal responsibility is a legal question. Whether she should ever walk free again is a separate one. Touching either question with a 10-foot pole will land you in hot water with those whose minds are already convinced toward one result.

Use the word “psychosis” and you’re accused of excusing murder. Use the word “evil” and you’re accused of hating women. Neither is true. There are legitimate questions to ask about what doctors knew, how much they ignored and what combination of drugs had what effect on her brain. If you suspect a patient has undiagnosed bipolar disorder, for example, and you prescribe medication known to cause psychotic episodes in bipolar patients, who is responsible? Courts weigh degrees of culpability every day, for men and for women, without anyone accusing the jury of letting a killer off the hook.

We also have to be allowed to at least wonder how much Clancy could control. It can’t be out of bounds to ask about the parts of her actions that appeared premeditated and organized, more ordered than is generally in keeping with a person in the throes of psychosis. People have to be allowed to ask how likely it is for psychosis this severe to strike a full eight months after delivery. Asking these questions doesn’t mean you hate women. It means you’re trying to make sense of something that doesn’t make sense. And it’s a good thing most of us can’t understand a psychotic mind. It’s not supposed to make sense! That’s not how we are supposed to naturally think or understand the world.

5. This has devolved to reveal a longstanding war of the sexes, and I’d rather name it than pretend otherwise.

The fact of the matter is that many men are using Lindsay Clancy as proof that women are too unstable for equal civic power, and some of them mean it. Many women are using her to scapegoat men, while perpetuating an unhealthy belief that women are never, under any circumstances, the actual problem.

The men have a point when they say agency still exists inside diminished capacity. The women have a point when they say the maternal health system failed her before it failed her children. I can hold both of those without surrendering either one, and I refuse to let the extremists on either side tell me I can’t.

What I won’t do is sit quietly while one woman’s catastrophe gets used as an indictment of women as a voting class. That’s just wildly stupid when drawn to its logical conclusion. Can you imagine if the roles were inverted? If we, as a society, responded to a man’s choice to kill his children by seriously entertaining the notion that all men, therefore, should be stripped of their voting rights? How well do you think that would go over? Would the menfolk even dream of allowing it? Of course not.

Men are responsible for the overwhelming majority of the world’s violent and sexual crime. Men make up the majority of people diagnosed as psychopaths. Men defend other violent and criminal men every single day of the week. (How is Andrew Tate a millionaire otherwise?) Nobody proposes revoking their ballots over it. Collective guilt is not a standard anyone actually wants applied evenly. If it were, the men making this argument would lose their voting rights first. So why in heaven’s name are we doing this? Seriously.

None of this resolves neatly, and I’m suspicious of anyone who claims it does. For most of the people arguing about it online, this case stopped being about Lindsay Clancy days ago. It’s about which sex gets the benefit of the doubt, and which one has to earn every single time they want an audience on anything at all. I don’t have a tidy bow to put on this dilemma. It’s a feud that’s been boiling over since time immemorial. I just know three kids didn’t get a vote in any of it, and it’s pretty unsettling that they’ve almost become an afterthought in this whole kerfuffle.

When Adam and Eve left Eden, part of the curse they carried with them was enmity between the sexes — the impulse to dominate, distrust, blame and struggle against one another. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen that enmity more nakedly on display than I do right now.

But Christians aren’t supposed to make peace with the curse. We’re supposed to be people of redemption who work to transcend it and model a better way.

Redemption doesn’t look like women circling the wagons around women no matter what, or men seizing on the worst thing one woman has ever done as evidence that women can’t be trusted. It looks like men and women telling the truth about each other and themselves, extending mercy without abandoning justice, and refusing to turn one another into the enemy.

Victory over the curse isn't going to look like one sex finally subduing the other and winning the war. It's going to look like having enough humility to admit there's a good reason God said it wasn't good for man to be alone. Left to our own devices, both sexes run amok. Created order means working together to graciously temper each other's worst inclinations, not cancel each other for having them in the first place.

Lord, have mercy.

Originally published at Honest to Goodness.