The Lindsay Clancy Trial Is Sparking a Political Divide on the Right

Lindsay Clancy does not deny that she murdered her three young children. In her trial, which is set to wrap up in the coming days, the facts of the case are virtually undisputed : In 2023 following months of devolving mental health and attempts to secure mental health support, Clancy strangled her three children — ages five, three, and eight months — with rubber exercise chords. Shortly after, she attempted to end her own life by jumping out of the window of her family home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, and was paralyzed from the waist down.

Clancy admits to the murders, her ex-husband said when he testified on her behalf. The question at hand is whether or not Clancy — whom her lawyers say had been suffering from severe postpartum psychosis at the time of the murders — is criminally responsible for first-degree premeditated murder and deserving of a life sentence in federal prison, or should be committed to a state psychiatric facility.

In the true-crime obsessed network of internet commentary, the Clancy case has already produced thousands of hours of coverage, theorizing, and analysis. It also opened up a tricky conversation about maternal and post-natal psychiatric health, as well as the limitations of public sympathy.

Postpartum depression is defined by the Cleveland Clinic as a severe depressive mood disorder that can develop during pregnancy and up to a year after the birth of a child. Causes can relate to “hormonal, physical, emotional, financial and social changes after having a baby.” Postpartum psychosis is an extreme, more rare form of postpartum disorder, characterized by symptoms including “severe agitation, confusion, feelings of hopelessness, delusions or hallucinations, rapid speech and mania,” that can last weeks or months.

Even talking about the baby blues can be difficult for many women, and postpartum mental health is often a misunderstood and potentially fraught topic. This specific iteration is happening, of course, within the context of a murder trial over three children who should be alive, and the notion that Clancey may not hold the entirety of the responsibility for their deaths — be it shared with a severe mental illness, or medical and institutional failure — is being met with outrage and accusation of outright support for Clancy’s actions. Editor’s picks The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century

This has been particularly acute among hyper-online, right-wing men. Women discussing their own experience with postpartum depression, postpartum psychosis, and the mental health struggles that can follow the birth of a child, are themselves being labeled as soulless pro-baby-murder sociopaths.

The ringleader of this push is, to no one’s surprise, professional far right agitator — and definitely not a doctor — Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire. Walsh went so far as to declare that postpartum depression, and consequently postpartum psychosis, is an overblown diagnosis that masks a woman’s selfishness, and an unwillingness by new mothers to surrender themselves to the demands of motherhood.