Lindsay Clancy Trial Spotlights Pained Cries for Maternal Support

The Lindsay Clancy trial is spotlighting the grotesque, abusive state of maternal care in the U.S., no matter the outcome. The system that failed Lindsay is made by politics.

You might be wondering what true crime and maternal support has to do with politics.

Answer: Everything.

The Lindsay Clancy trial is spotlighting the grotesque, abusive state of maternal care in the U.S., no matter the outcome. This is important because the “system” the public says failed the defendant is created by politics.

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In January of 2023, a Massachusetts mother named Lindsay Clancy brutally murdered her three children while her husband Patrick was running an errand at CVS. She then tried to kill herself, jumping out of a second story window, after cutting her wrists and neck, leaving her paralyzed.

Lindsay Clancy in court

It’s not lost on me that this is taking place in a state infamous for literal witch trials and a prosecution against Karen Read that exposed profound investigative bias, severe police misconduct, and a toxic internal culture.

A viral hashtag #WeAreLindsayClancy took off on social media as women identified with her mental health struggles as a mom with three kids under five and what they rightly see as the prevailing lack of care and support for new moms in the U.S..

The trial is ongoing, and so we don’t have all of the evidence yet. The jury will be tasked with deciding whether or not Lindsay Clancy is criminally responsible for the January 2023 strangulation deaths of her three children or if she should be found not guilty because she lacked the mental capacity to understand or control her actions due to severe postpartum psychosis.

But so far, the case has revealed the grotesque, abusive state of maternal care in the U.S., especially postpartum. While Lindsay Clancy is an upper middle class white woman with a husband who worked from home, a nanny, two kids in daycare, supportive parents on both sides, and access to the best healthcare, she still didn’t get the help she needed.

This should concern everyone, as it highlights a stark lack of care and support for mothers in a country that has overturned Roe and continues to attack abortion rights including medical abortion pills.

There are officials in this administration who incessantly push the idea of women as breeders who should stay at home. They have tried to pass laws that would make it harder for married women who have changed their name to vote. They have cut access to food and healthcare for single mothers, infants and children.

If a married woman with money is struggling in this culture, imagine a single mother. Imagine a single mother who is Black.

Oh, wait. You don’t have to imagine that because it happened and she was convicted in a trial overseen by the judge overseeing the Lindsay Clancy case.

In the middle of the Clancy case, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court overturned the first-degree murder convictions Plymouth Superior Court Judge William F. Sullivan oversaw in a remarkably similar 2018 child-killing case involving an insanity defense.

In Feb 2018, Latarsha Sanders stabbed to death her two young sons. She didn’t have access to the kind of mental health care that Lindsay Clancy did and does. Sanders was convicted of two counts of murder in the first degree on theories of deliberate premeditation and extreme atrocity or cruelty. In her appeal, Sanders argued the judge prohibited her from fully presenting a criminal responsibility defense by excluding relevant medical records that documented post arrest diagnoses/treatment of mental illness.

We didn’t hear anything about that case, and she didn’t get hashtags of support on social media. This fact reveals the uncomfortable reality that it is white upper-middle class or wealthy women whom social media uplifts as champion victims of an unfair system, while women of color and poorer, less conventionally attractive women are too often ignored.

The issue with this disparity in justice and social capital/attention is that it reinforces the idea that people who look like those who have power in courts, law enforcement systems, and now social media, get special treatment. And even worse, a finding that does not hold Clancy responsible for the murder of her kids could be used against poorer women around the country in custody battles if they’ve ever a moment of depression or anxiety.

I’m not suggesting Lindsay shouldn’t get what might be justice because it will harm others, but rather that all women are less empowered in the U.S. If we are going to acknowledge that about Lindsay Clancy, we need to make sure we include all women.

No matter which side people are taking, this case is a tragedy. It’s also not happening in a vacuum. Tragically, there’s been a recent spate of infanticide and family annihilation in the U.S..

Dearth of Empathy and Compassion

The dearth of empathy and compassion demonstrated by nearly everyone in this case, including the public, has been horrible to witness.

The prosecutors are tasked with a tough job as they have to lay out evidence that Lindsay Clancy made a "calculated decision" to murder her children. For some reason, this task involves prosecutor Shanan Buckingham wearing a bow in her hair every day, seemingly to call attention to Lindsay’s murdered daughter Cora, who loved bows. Every day that this trial goes on, Buckingham wears a bow. The Buckingham Bow changes color and size. But they never stop being stunningly inappropriate.

One of the pieces of evidence a male police officer testified to was a Facebook post in which Lindsay was asking advice about her son, saying he was the “most difficult human I have ever encountered.” The police seemed to think they really had something there, but mothers round the world rolled their eyes. It didn’t help that witnesses have testified that she was a great mother.

Still, what’s been lost by the social media identification with Lindsay Clancy is the fact that she did murder her three children. Via strangulation. Which can take up to four to five minutes. That’s a very long time to be staring at someone who is dying because of your actions. This shouldn’t be glossed over because people recognize the unacceptable state of support for mothers in this country. Two things can be true.

Another common social media argument is that this case shouldn’t have been brought, which raises the issue of should we only prosecute murder when the murderer is not in some form of mental health distress? Nearly every domestic violence murder takes place in a form of extreme psychological distress. I can see a precedent like that quickly weaponized against women in our current system.

It also raises the issue of the case brought against Latarsha Sanders and again, the lack of public outcry over her 2022 first-degree murder convictions. Will we only not bring charges against women whose demographics mirror a lot of social media users?

Conspiracies Avoid the Horror

This case has brought out the Internet’s love of a conspiracy theory. Currently, they are blaming Patrick Clancy for the murders. But Linsday Clancy’s defense lawyer Kevin Reddington has never directly disputed that Clancy strangled her children with exercise bands. The defense instead has admitted to the physical acts, while focusing on what they assert as her lack of criminal responsibility due to severe postpartum psychosis and over-medication.

It’s important to separate the need for compassion and advocacy for better maternal care with an acknowledgement of the tragedy. The tragedy gets undermined and even lost when people use this case for social media engagement to spin conspiracy theories blaming the father for the murder because they think his shoes are a different color in surveillance footage of his errands during the murder, but we can hardly blame them.

A president’s personality always impacts the country, and so of course the man who spent years demanding Barack Obama’s birth certificate, claimed he saw Muslims in America cheering 9/11 on TV, and gaslit the country claiming he won the very secure 2020 election that he definitely lost — who then hired a vaccine conspiracy theorist to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services — oversees a nation of “do your own research” private investigators.

It doesn’t help that a lot of what’s going on in our country right now has rightly fostered profound distrust in institutions, including law enforcement and media. Decades long cover-ups have come to light, further eroding confidence.

Epstein files, anyone?

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Handmaid’s Era

We are currently in our Handmaid’s Tale era, so that isn’t helping.

We are living in a time period of surveillance, control and domination of women. This trial is taking place within that context. The reactions to it are within that context. The failures and the biases on display are within that context.

This is not an easy time to be a woman in this country. While it’s never been super kind to women, the previous era was better than this. The U.S. is currently rolling back women’s rights in every direction, which is a diminishment of women’s humanity and dignity.

This dystopian reality shows in the pained cries for help and attention from mothers everywhere.

Maternal Care is Political

If we look at this case to ask for justice, maybe we’re missing the point. There is no justice for a life taken. There is only profound, unspeakable loss for the family.

Prevention should be the goal, and that’s done by policy and culture.

People often say they’re not into politics these days. But politics are always into them. Public policy, laws, and governance shape daily life whether we pay attention or not.

So yes, even motherhood is political. True crime is political. Human rights are political. Throughout history, rights have been taken from those who do not zealously, relentlessly and continuously demand them.

Nothing evinces the role of public policy on children more than data from the global United Nations on Drugs and Crime showing that in 2016, the U.S. had consistently higher rates of child homicide compared to the rest of the world (one can imagine they might be even worse now as women’s rights have been rolled back in the U.S.).

“…child homicide data from 41 countries are included found that in 2016 the homicide rate homicide rate of those aged 0–19 years was 2.6 per 100,000 population, with US figures consistently higher (5.3 per 100,000 population) in comparison with the rest of the world’s rates (0.6 per 100,000 population in Europe).”

Suicide and homicide are leading causes of death for pregnant and postpartum women in the U.S.. There is clearly something wrong with the U.S. and its care of women.

There’s clearly something wrong with the U.S. and its care of women.

Imagine instead a culture of support for new mothers that included home visits. It exists in other countries.

In the UK, new mothers and babies receive free medical and practical care through the (much demonized by those against Medicare for All policy ideas) NHS, which includes home visits from midwives and health visitors, child health clinics, financial aid like the Healthy Start food scheme, and mental health support.

Germany and the Netherlands offer care and support that comes to the new mother’s home to help with all sorts of tasks. In the Netherlands, it’s called kraamzorg and is often covered by insurance, but if not is affordable. In Germany, new moms are expected to take postpartum rest, called Wochenbett, during which a midwife visits the home every day for the first ten days and then tapering to every couple of days. This is usually covered by insurance as well.

I’m sure none of these systems are perfect, but the statistics suggest our system in the U.S. is much worse. The U.S. under Donald Trump has been cutting federal health and nutrition programs, engaging in public health surveillance, and cutting Medicaid funding. These policy decisions are political, and they have reduced clinic capacities and accelerated rural hospital labor and delivery closures.

All of those political decisions impact vulnerable mothers.

And even when the mother is not economically vulnerable, women do not get the same medical research funding and support as men. Women’s pain is often dismissed by the medical community. Women’s medical issues in general are not well known.

The same people who say they’re not into politics are saying the “system” failed Lindsay Clancy. The system is politics. The system is chosen by us, the voters.

We are the system. Surely we can do better than this.

Discuss the Lindsay Clancy case in the comments below.

Note: The evidence has not all been presented yet. The trial is ongoing. The defendant is innocent until proven guilty. I am not a lawyer. We are looking at this case in terms of intersection between policy, lawmaking, systemic racial and gender bias in the legal system, and culture.