In the hours before the courthouse in Plymouth, Mass., opens, hundreds of women clad in pink have been massing outside. They’ve come to support Lindsay Clancy, the mother on trial for killing her three young children, ages 5, 3 and 8 months.
In almost any other case, it would be an odd declaration of allegiance. But Clancy is not a typical murder suspect. She attempted for months after the birth of her third child to get treatment for what she reported was her increasing postpartum derangement. Then she killed her children, she has admitted, in what she says was a state of psychosis. Closing arguments begin tomorrow. (Here’s what to know about the trial.)
Should she be treated like an ordinary killer? That question is a Rorschach test for Americans fascinated by this case. Some say Clancy was failed by a system that doesn’t take postpartum mental illness seriously enough. “It should not take tragedy for people to pay attention to mental health,” said Renee Kimball, the organizer of the courthouse demonstration.
Other people are horrified by arguments like that, saying they ignore the facts of this incomprehensible crime. “I don’t look at her and feel sorry for her,” said the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly. “Three kids are dead!”
Whatever the jury decides, for many people the case has become a proxy for all manner of perceived societal ills.
The meanings of a tragedy
One perspective on this calamity remains straightforward: Clancy killed her children and must pay the price. That is the view of the prosecution (which has charged her with first-degree murder, a crime with a mandatory life sentence) as well as several pundits. A headline on one conservative site put it this way: “Lindsay Clancy Defenders Are Just as Sick as She Is.”
But others see her case as evidence of a nation that neglects new mothers and fails to properly care for maternal mental health. Clancy, a labor and delivery nurse who experienced debilitating insomnia and other symptoms, visited the emergency room twice, went to a day program, called a suicide hotline and checked into a residential program, which discharged her. “I really need help,” she messaged her psychiatric nurse practitioner. She reported intrusive thoughts, received therapy over Zoom and got 30 prescriptions for 13 medications. But nobody ever diagnosed her with postpartum psychosis, an emergency that would have warranted hospitalization.
For that reason, many view the children’s deaths as a product not of individual depravity but of a broken medical system. Hundreds of women have posted on social media about their own postpartum struggles and expressed empathy for Clancy. Allie Beth Stuckey, a conservative Christian commentator and a fan of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., told her viewers that she had a split reaction when she heard about the case. She felt “immediate disgust and anger,” she said, but also a recognition of “how dark and how out-of-control for some women postpartum can be.”
Lenience for moms?
Our thinking about cases like these has changed over the decades.
Twenty-five years ago, a Texas nurse named Andrea Yates drowned her five children in the bathtub and then wrapped them in sheets. Her defense, too, said she was suffering from psychosis. (She wanted to be executed, though, because she believed that the Devil lived within her, her lawyer, George Parnham, said in an interview.) The jury found her guilty, but she got a new trial and was found not guilty by reason of insanity.
After that, Parnham pushed state lawmakers to adjust the strict definition of insanity and to allow a lighter sentence for mothers with postpartum mental disorders. He made little headway then, but now people are more open about mental illness. “We don’t think about people who struggle mentally as automatically just not tough enough, malingerers — just fakers — in the way that we might have 20, 30 years ago,” said Michelle Oberman, a legal scholar who has studied cases of mothers who kill.
Today, some three dozen countries offer juries an option between murder and insanity, one that recognizes the particular mental vulnerabilities that can arise after birth and set a significantly lower penalty for mothers who kill an infant. One similar bill has passed in the United States, in Illinois.
Still, the question of whether mental illness diminishes culpability remains in dispute, and many states in recent decades have made it harder to use an insanity defense. (The tide began to turn when a jury acquitted John Hinckley Jr. on the basis of insanity after his attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan.) Five states have eliminated the insanity defense altogether.
In cases like the Clancy killings, the debate may boil down to this: Is the crime so heinous that insanity cannot excuse it, or is it so heinous that only insanity can explain it?
Click the video below to see the scene outside the courthouse.
FROM OPINION
Women often tell their doctors they’re fine, even if they’re not. It’s time to break that habit, Allison Sweet Grant, a former nurse practitioner, writes.
Companies surveil you and use that data to change the prices they set. Stronger pricing laws could change that, Stephanie T. Nguyen, a former Federal Trade Commission leader, writes.
MORNING READS
SPORTS
M.L.B.: The Yankees slugger Giancarlo Stanton could miss the rest of the season after his third calf strain this year, including two during rehab.
Tennis: Serena Williams and Carlos Alcaraz are teaming up for mixed doubles at the U.S. Open, where Novak Djokovic and the women’s No. 1, Aryna Sabalenka, are a team, too.
N.F.L.: The Cleveland Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson was booed in his first appearance in front of home fans since they cheered when he was carted off with a torn Achilles in October 2024. He called the boos “disrespectful.”
BOOK OF THE WEEK
“The Breakup,” by Kurt Andersen.
Andersen’s zeitgeisty dystopian novel opens with epigraphs from Charles Dickens, Donald Rumsfeld and Joan Didion — an unlikely group of voices that sets the tone for the cautionary tale that follows. The year is 2045. After a civil war, the United States has devolved into two factions: a left-leaning collection of states and the right-leaning Free American Republic. Against this fractious backdrop we meet Natalie Frederick and Ash Zimbalist (Andersen completists will recognize the surname from “Turn of the Century”), a separated couple who reunite for a college tour with their younger child. “Domestic dramas are already thick on the ground in American fiction,” our reviewer, Jonathan Dee, writes. “What readers of ‘The Breakup’ will come for, in this moment of what seems like unsustainable polarization and anger and wanton trampling of American civic institutions and ideals, is a vision of our near-term future that is violent and admonitory and cathartically terrible and yet somehow still survivable.”
New nonfiction: The historian Jill Lepore’s book explores what happens when we abandon democracy for government by machine. Read our review.
“When my husband and I start arguing, if my children happen to be in the room, I will look at them and say: ‘It’s OK that we’re fighting. We’re arguing because we love each other. This is an important conversation.’ I’m kind of saying it as much to them as I am to myself.”
— Priya Parker, the conflict resolution facilitator and author of the new book “The Art of Fighting,” in conversation with David Marchese. They spoke about how conflict can be a pathway to greater connection and about how to deal with some common workplace and family conflicts. Read the interview here.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
Skip those “for men” detergents. Even if woodsy, tobacco-drenched scents are your speed, they stink at cleaning.
MEAL PLAN
It’s late August and kids are (or soon will be) heading back to school. Margaux Laskey, an NYT Cooking editor, has some recipes to make the transition a little bit easier. You’ll want to try this slow cooker chicken and bean fideo — a comforting stew of tender chicken, pinto beans and toasted noodles. (Throw in more chipotles to dial up the heat.) She also recommends one-pot tuna orzo with zucchini, turkey chili and more.
NOW TIME TO PLAY
Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were curtain and taciturn.
Can you put eight historical events — including the development of Greek dramas, a tactic of the Persian cavalry and the rise of Beanie Babies — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz.
