The Lindsay Clancy case in the USA, which Sarah and I discussed at length on last week’s podcast, is by any measure horrifying. A previously loving, normal, suburban mother strangles three of her children with exercise bands, then attempts to take her own life, and ends up alive, paralysed, and on trial for murder. The father comes home to find the scene. It’s the stuff of nightmares.
Attention around the case on the political right – and indeed our own attention on the podcast – has focused heavily on the enormous outpouring of support for Clancy from American women, who have raised bucketloads of money to assist her criminal defence, which essentially amounts to the notion that she was not criminally responsible because of a combination of post-partum psychosis and a really bad cocktail of drugs.
To a great many people, including me initially, this seemed obscene: There are lots of things in this world that you can spend your energy and money on, and it instinctively seems a little strange to spend it on the defence of somebody who, by her own admission, killed three toddlers. Your sympathy, I thought, should be with the dead kids who met awful deaths than with the woman who killed them.
But confession time: The more I read about the case, the more I think Sarah and I might have been wrong. Sarah can, of course, can speak for herself.
The first thing here is that Clancy has, evidently, been severely punished for what she did. She will never walk again. She will likely – regardless of the outcome of the trial – not be a free woman until the best years of her life are spent. She will carry the psychological burden of what she did until she dies. There is not much that the state could add to that with a guilty verdict.
The more interesting and pertinent question is whether anyone else deserves punishment. This, I now see, is the point many of the protesters – the saner ones at least – are making.
A few things are not in dispute. First, that before she lost her wits, Lindsay Clancy was a good mother, and a midwife, whose own ex-husband (the father of the murdered children) says needed help and did not get it.
Second, that Clancy’s apparent condition – post partum psychosis (as aside from depression) – is both very real and very rare.
Third, that she had sought extensive treatment for it, suggesting that she knew she had a problem and did not actually wish to harm anyone.
Fourth, that there appear to have been very serious medical failings in her care, up to and including two separate doctors prescribing different medications for the same condition which may have acted to counter each other.
It’s also important, I think, to step back from the culture war noise and look at the facts of a case and a life before a major incident happened: Clancy had never been in trouble before, never had any red flags raised, never displayed any murderous or suicidal intent…. Until she took the drugs.
Without wishing to be flippant, there are a great many people out there on the right who blamed the covid vaccine for just about everything, but who appear now in this case to be overlooking the possible role of medications, or big Pharma entirely. Exhibit A being the American commentator Matt Walsh.
Of course, that this case has become such a culture war bunfight makes talking about it harder. I confess that my instinct, initially, was simply to look at all these mainly left-leaning women cheering for a child killer and to be repulsed at the depravity of it all.
Yet simultaneously, it’s very possible that there are a great many women out there looking at us over on the political right jumping up and down on Lindsay Clancy and seeing a complete lack of compassion for a woman who very genuinely was sick and – quite possibly – was failed by her doctors. Never the twain shall meet, and of course the price of saying “maybe I was wrong” is much higher these days than it should be.
And so, the more I read about it, the more I do think I was wrong on last week’s podcast. A guilty verdict in this case would, I think, be the sub-optimal outcome: It would allow us all to close the book on the matter, declare Clancy the villain, and move on. A verdict that partially – partially – exonerated her of responsibility and put the focus back on the medics and the drug companies, especially those companies that make psychotic medications, might well be more societally useful.
Ultimately though, nothing is going to bring back those poor children. May they rest in peace. This is such a terribly sad case, whatever way you look at it.
JMG
Thanks for this, it’s very interesting, I was going to write about the implications of the case and still probably am but there’s a lot to think about here
Fair play! It's truly rare to a journalist reflect and correct. Well done.