I’ve been wanting to write about about Lindsay Clancy, the 35-year-old former Massachusetts labor-and-delivery nurse who is currently standing trial for first-degree murder of her three young children, for weeks. She was prescribed 13 different psychiatric medications in the months leading up to the horrific killings of her babies.
In case you haven’t been following Clancy’s story, after she allegedly strangled her three children, eight-month old Callan, five-year-old Cora and three-year-old Dawson, she tried to kill herself by slashing her wrists and neck before jumping from a second-story window. The fall paralyzed Clancy from the waist down and she is currently in a wheelchair. Meanwhile, her husband, is already remarried.
Although the case is spotlighting postpartum psychosis and the struggles of maternal mental health, what it really exposes is how deadly American motherhood can be for all of us, literally and figuratively. The truth is, anyone who has given birth in America could have been Lindsay Clancy. That’s why so many women are connecting with this trial.
While I’ve spoken and written countless articles, and a book, about my own birth trauma, surviving giving birth in America was just one part of my journey. I had no idea the hell that was waiting for me post hospital discharge. Looking back, I do not know how I got through it.
After almost dying in childbirth at one of the best hospitals in Washington, DC, I came back home to C-section recovery with no information, insight or clue as to what my body was healing from. I didn’t even know C-sections are considered major surgery! Everyone kept making me feel like I should “bounce back,” intentional or not. Even though I had three months paid leave from the ‘feminist’ women’s non-profit I was working at, which is a rarity in America, when I got back to the office, I had zero support. And this was in an office full of women!
My boss made me feel insecure and emotional as soon as I returned, my own mother abandoned me to rush back to Bangladesh for a wedding (!), and in the midst of navigating being a new working mom in America, my thyroid issues blew up and my right eye was literally bulging out of my head. My maternity leave was filled with doctor appointments as I struggled to find someone to watch my newborn while I tried to get a diagnosis.
Did I mention my husband was in the early stages of building his company, so I was the breadwinner from my measly non-profit job? Looking back, we had no support, no childcare, and pressure from so many sides, including from our own families. After months of people asking how you were and what you needed for the baby, once our kid was here, despite my supportive husband, I was isolated and alone.
“Women are the most prescribed demographic for SSRIs [Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors] in this country,” , women’s health activist, birth and postpartum doula, writes on her Instagram. “And it’s not some big pharma conspiracy, it’s because being a mother in America objectively sucks.”
That is, honestly, one of the best descriptions I’ve read about motherhood in America because it is true. Indeed, objectively, it sucks. There’s really no better way to say it and trust me when I say, I tried.
But motherhood in America doesn’t just “suck;” it’s deadly. In fact, according to the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), obstetrical complications are no longer the leading causes of maternal death. Homicide, suicide, and drug overdose are. The NEJM finds that violence, including both homicide and suicide, now outpaces every traditional obstetric cause of maternal death in the US. Deaths from these causes nearly equaled the combined toll of cardiovascular disease, infection, hypertension, and hemorrhage, the medical journal reports.
“The classic dogma in medical, public health, and obstetrical training is that the leading causes of maternal death in the United States are cardiovascular disease, hypertension, hemorrhage, and infection,” the report states. “Public health statistics of maternal death reinforce this view because they typically exclude drug overdose and violence (homicide and suicide). “However, pregnancy-associated violence and drug overdose occur more frequently than previously understood.”
The issue of violence and homicide are uniquely dangerous in the United States because of easy access to firearms. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), homicide is the leading cause of death among pregnant women, mostly from gun violence.
The Clancy trial exposes not only America’s maternal health crisis, but our maternal mental health crisis. Furthermore, it reveals that in the postpartum period, we totally abandon new mothers. The six week check-up is a joke and so many women fall through the cracks of this small screening.
What saddens and infuriates me about Lindsay Clancy’s trial is that it’s not a story of a woman not seeking help. It’s a story of a woman being FAILED, by every doctor, therapist and especially her own family members. I cannot wait to see what her legal team finds on her husband because there are too many unanswered questions about his role in everything.
But Clancy’s trial also offers women and mothers in America a glimmer— a glimmer of hope that the system that is failing and killing women, or worse, causing them to harm their children, must be changed to listen to, center and believe women. Mental health is healthcare. And in America, too many women mother without a village, or anyone, in their corner. This must change.
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