The Limits of Therapeutic Compassion
It's possible to believe Clancy was profoundly mentally ill and genuinely suicidal without it settling the question of her responsibility.
The most revealing argument being made for Lindsay Clancy is also the weakest one: that many mothers experience intrusive thoughts, postpartum anxiety, sleeplessness and psychic distress, and therefore we should understand Clancy’s killing of her three children as the terrible end point of an experience that is, in some form, common to motherhood. But this gets the moral logic almost exactly backward.
A mother who suddenly imagines putting her baby in an oven and is horrified by the thought has not discovered that she is halfway to murder. She has discovered the difference between a thought and a will. She recoils, she calls her husband, or perhaps she seeks company. The entire significance of the story is that the thought is alien to her deepest intentions.
Lindsay Clancy strangled Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months old.
It is possible to believe that Clancy was profoundly mentally ill, badly served by modern psychiatric medicine and genuinely suicidal without pretending that these facts settle the question of her responsibility. After all, they don’t.
That is precisely what her trial has been about. The prosecution has not argued that Clancy was perfectly healthy. Its experts acknowledged serious mental illness while maintaining that she understood the difference between right and wrong. Prosecutors also pointed to evidence of deliberation: Clancy checked the travel time to a restaurant, sent her husband out to collect food and medicine and was then alone with the children.
The defense interprets those facts differently and argues that postpartum psychosis had destroyed her ability to comprehend what she was doing. The jury must decide between those accounts. What the rest of us should resist is the increasingly familiar idea that explaining an evil act somehow requires explaining away the person who committed it.
This is one of the more corrosive habits of therapeutic culture: Every human action is traced backward through trauma, diagnosis, medication, hormones, social conditions and institutional failures until individual agency finally disappears from view. The murderer becomes the last link in a causal chain for which everyone else bears responsibility.
Hence the signs outside the courthouse. “She Needed Help,” they read. “They Failed Her.” And perhaps they did fail her. So it goes: A fragmented mental-health system may have failed Lindsay Clancy badly, but it was Lindsay Clancy’s children who died.
That distinction has become strangely difficult to maintain. Supporters dressed in pink gathered outside the courthouse for Clancy, while a smaller group came to remember Cora, Dawson and Callan. News reports described the latter as “counterprotesters,” as though three murdered children had somehow become the opposing political faction. This moral displacement is even more striking in the repeated description of Clancy as a “darn good mother.”
She may have been loving for years. She may have packed lunches, kissed scraped knees and stayed awake with sick children. None of that is meaningless. But motherhood is not primarily an emotional identity. It is an obligation to particular children, and those children depended upon her more completely than anyone else in the world.
Our culture increasingly prefers compassion without judgment because judgment feels cruel. But compassion severed from judgment quickly becomes sentimentality, and sentimentality has a peculiar way of lavishing its greatest concern on the adult whose story is psychologically complicated rather than the children whose claims are simple.
Cora wanted to live; so did Dawson and Callan.
Their needs were not complicated. There is nothing anti-woman, anti-mother or anti-psychiatry about saying so. Postpartum psychosis is real. Severe mental illness can genuinely destroy legal responsibility. If that is what happened to Lindsay Clancy, the insanity defense exists for exactly that reason.
But that conclusion must be proved. It cannot simply be assumed because the alternative — that a suffering mother might nevertheless retain enough agency to commit a terrible crime — is too painful to contemplate. A civilization that takes both mercy and responsibility seriously must be capable of holding two truths at once. Lindsay Clancy may deserve pity for what happened to her mind. Her children deserve justice for what she did.
