The Lindsey Clancy Case Tells Us Absolutely Nothing About Motherhood

What does the horrifying case of Lindsey Clancy—the 36-year-old Connecticut mother who strangled her three children to death before throwing herself out a second story window in 2023—say about motherhood in the US?

Nothing. Really: Nothing.

This is a nation of more than 340 million people. One woman uniquely afflicted with bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis (and taking a cocktail of more than two dozen medications related to these conditions) gruesomely killed her three children.

In any sane society, this story would be universally met with both impersonal sympathy and earnest prayers (those poor murdered children, their poor sick mother, their poor heartbroken father and grandparents; Lord help them all). In any sane society, there would be no widespread impulse to extrapolate anything from this family’s devastation. In any sane society, the outcome of Clancy’s criminal trial (i.e., whether she was or wasn’t sufficiently cogent to be found guilty of murder) would be a matter of impersonal curiosity for those in law school, and nothing more.

But because we are no longer a sane society, this Clancy case has become a political and cultural football. Let’s start with the “what” of that unfortunate phenomenon; then, we’ll get to the “why.”

Politicizing Motherhood (and Especially Postpartum)

In reaction to the case of a mother diagnosed with postpartum psychosis (which is an extremely rare and exceptionally scary condition, but one that almost never results in murder) who strangled her three children, many liberal women, especially mothers, express empathy and identification with the perpetrator. “I could have been Lindsey” or “there but for some lucky breaks went I,” they allege.

Wearing pink (ostensibly to signify female solidarity with how hard motherhood broadly and the postpartum period specifically are for many women), Clancy’s supporters rally outside the courthouse and tell reporters and one another that Lindsey just didn’t get the help she needed. Because sexism. That is, women and mothers aren’t heard, supported, or scaffolded in the way that they need, including when they are unwell.

The implication is that, if maternal conditions do not improve, more mothers will commit filicide. This implied threat fits in with the trendy leftist perspective on maternity more generally: All-consuming, miserable, near impossible to get right, and perhaps best avoided if you want to maintain your sanity.

Meanwhile, prominent (mostly male) voices on the online right claim that what women call post-partum depression (PPD) is mostly just selfishness. If you’re a good, feminine, moral woman, they all but state outright, you simply will find motherhood natural, easy and joyful.

It’s fascinating and disturbing that both these groups—the liberal female Clancy empathizers and the conservative male PPD deniers—elide the vast difference between post-partum depression (fairly common and typically remediated by lifestyle changes including sleep) and post-partum psychosis (extremely rare and typically remediated only by real medical treatment) for their own purposes.

The male PPD deniers make this elision because they simply want to broadly condemn the morality, femininity, and worthiness all women who don’t fit their faux-nostalgia for a time that never actually existed: Back in the good old days, when all women were happy wives and mothers who adored and looked up to men like them.

The female “I am Lindsey” brigade, meanwhile, makes the elision between depression and psychosis for a far more interesting set of reasons: Social media has turned their natural sympathy into identitarian solipsism and their natural anxiety into catastrophizing self-righteousness.

Personalizing the Pathological

The notion that Clancy is no different from a perfectly normal wife and mother who had PPD (or just a tough few weeks during a baby’s infancy) once or twice is insane. It’s like saying that someone with a stomach bug and someone with stomach cancer are both sick.

But this elision serves a purpose when the “enemy” (i.e., the too online male right) is claiming that stomach bugs aren’t so bad and failing to buy ginger ale (i.e., in this analogy, failing to offer and support the help new moms need). “Aren’t so bad,” you say, deplorable patriarch? This stomach issue can result in death! (That’s the stomach cancer, not the stomach bug, of course—but no matter. Precision doesn’t serve anyone here).

Here’s what I’m getting at: Of course motherhood is hard. Of course men can’t truly understand how hard—and thus have to, if they intend to be of any use in reducing the difficulty, trust women on some level. Of course the postpartum period can be uniquely fraught and sometimes truly, deeply difficult. And of course living among and with men who don’t acknowledge this reality can be disheartening and scary.

And thus, the fear-based desire to “score a point” on this perennial enemy (conservative men who maddeningly and misogynistically downgrade the difficulties and costs of femaleness and motherhood) drives many leftist women to embrace a perspective that is truly unhinged, to the point where they are all but celebrating the strangulation of three innocent children.

These women are primed by identitarian anxiety to—contra all empirical reality—see themselves in Clancy.

In reality, of course, this case has nothing to do with them and nothing to do with motherhood broadly. The likelihood that they or any mother of their acquaintance would ever be in Clancy’s position is infinitesimal, because the number of mothers who ever have been or ever will be in Clancy’s position is infinitesimal.

The context of intragroup variance is the great enemy of a worldview that centers so-called systemic issues sans any individual agency and sans any sense of scale. In other words: The vast majority of mothers don’t get post-partum psychosis; and the vast majority of those who do still don’t kill their children.

But some left-leaning women are primed by a combination of social media induced narcissism and ideologically induced myopia to generalize as their own fears what it could only make sense to contextualize as others’ tragedies.

Just think, after all, about how the same types of women who are rallying for Clancy responded to covid.