Lindsay Clancy and the dark side of postpartum

Tomorrow, closing arguments begin in a trial that has dominated headlines in the United States for weeks. In the defendant’s seat is Lindsay Clancy, a Massachusetts nurse accused of killing her three children.

In January 2023, Lindsay waited for her husband to leave the house, strangled her three children, and then tried to take her own life. Cora was five years old. Dawson, three. Callan, just eight months.

There is no doubt about who killed the children. The question that has gripped the United States in recent weeks is far more difficult: to what extent can someone in the midst of a severe postpartum crisis be held responsible for her own actions?

Lindsay pleaded not guilty to three counts of murder on the grounds of lack of criminal responsibility. If convicted, she could spend the rest of her life in prison. If found not criminally responsible, she will be sent to a state psychiatric institution.

The case is disturbing because it resists the comfortable categories we usually rely on to make sense of brutal crimes. It is much easier to imagine a mother who kills her three children as a monster than to admit the possibility that a woman who loved her children could, in a certain mental state, become capable of killing them.

Acknowledging this possibility does not mean denying the tragedy, diminishing the deaths of three children, or defending Lindsay Clancy. It simply means recognizing that criminal responsibility presupposes some degree of capacity to understand and control one’s own actions.

The idea that the period immediately following childbirth can profoundly alter that capacity is not foreign to Brazilian criminal law. Our Penal Code defines a specific crime for a mother who kills her own child during or shortly after birth “under the influence of the puerperal state”: infanticide. The prescribed sentence is two to six years. By comparison, simple homicide in Brazil is punishable by six to twenty years in prison.

Naturally, the Brazilian framework cannot simply be transplanted onto Lindsay Clancy’s case. Her children were of different ages, the youngest was already eight months old, and the legal debate in Massachusetts is a different one. But the existence of this offense reveals something important: the law has long recognized that changes associated with childbirth can be relevant in assessing the responsibility of a mother who kills her own child.

Perhaps that is why Lindsay’s trial has provoked such an unusual reaction among women following the case in the United States. On social media and in American coverage, many mothers have expressed not only horror at the murder of three children, but something harder to admit: empathy for Lindsay.

Not because they ever wanted to kill their children, but because they identify with the experience that preceded the crime.

They recognize the sleep deprivation, the intrusive thoughts, the anxiety, the fear of losing control, and the feeling of not recognizing one’s own mind after giving birth. Experiences that, for the vast majority of women, will never lead to violence, but that make it harder to see Lindsay simply as a monstrous mother who decided to kill her own children.

This is where the case becomes so uncomfortable. For many of these women, Lindsay does not seem entirely like an incomprehensible creature. At some point in a story that ended in unimaginable tragedy, they can see something they recognize in themselves.

It is no coincidence that many of them mention sleep deprivation, which, when deliberate and prolonged, has been used as an interrogation method and is recognized by international bodies as a form of ill-treatment.

None of this answers the question of Lindsay’s criminal responsibility. It is possible to acknowledge the seriousness of postpartum mental illness and still conclude that Lindsay was responsible for what she did.

Perhaps this distinction has been lost in part of the discussion. Trying to understand how a mother reached the point of killing her three children does not mean justifying her.

Motherhood is usually presented almost exclusively in the language of blessing, unconditional love, and fulfillment. But it can also bring isolation, hormonal changes, sleepless nights, anxiety, depression, and a physical and mental exhaustion that is hard to grasp for those who have never experienced it, but entirely palpable for those who have lived through something similar.

In the overwhelming majority of cases, these challenges will never come anywhere near what happened inside that house in Massachusetts. Three children were killed, and they are the victims of this story.

But perhaps it is possible to hold on to that truth and admit another at the same time: some women become seriously ill after becoming mothers. Recognizing this before a tragedy happens does not diminish individual responsibility, nor does it turn every exhausted mother into a potential killer. It simply strips motherhood of an idealization that can make it even harder to notice when a woman is no longer just tired and has come to need help.

Tomorrow, the jury will begin deciding whether Lindsay Clancy should be held criminally responsible for her children’s deaths. Whatever the answer, perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this trial is realizing that, for so many of the mothers who followed it, the story doesn’t feel as distant as we would like it to.