Let me paint you a picture, and you tell me if something ain’t sideways in this country.
Outside Plymouth Superior Court in Massachusetts this week, hundreds of women showed up wearing pink, holding their own babies in their arms, and cheering for a woman who strangled her three children. Not metaphorically. Not “allegedly” in the way the news likes to hedge. Lindsay Clancy doesn’t deny it. She killed 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan with her bare hands in their Duxbury home on January 24, 2023. Then she jumped out a second-story window and survived, which is more than can be said for her kids.
And the crowd outside? They’re rooting for her.
Now, I’m a woman who believes in grace and mercy every bit as much as the next person who sits in a pew on Sunday morning. I believe in mental illness being real. I believe postpartum psychosis is a serious medical condition, not something to wave away. But I also believe in the difference between a victim and a perpetrator, and bless their hearts, this crowd has gotten it exactly backwards.
The defense has called Dr. Paul Zeizel, a forensic psychologist, who testified that Clancy told him she heard a “male voice” ordering her to kill her children and herself. A male voice. And here’s the part the prosecutors keep hammering, and I think they’re right to: there is no record of Clancy ever mentioning hearing voices to any of her doctors before the murders. Not once. The male voice only showed up after three children were dead. She did tell her husband Patrick about “intrusive thoughts” roughly two months before the killings. So she knew something was wrong. Everyone around her knew something was wrong.
And here’s what burns me up. The supporters keep chanting that “the system failed her.” What system? By every account I can find, this woman had more support than most families in this country could dream of. Multiple doctors. Psychiatric medications, prescribed and adjusted. Both sets of grandparents involved. A nanny. Daycare. Her husband Patrick took months of paternity leave and then worked from home so he could be there. On the day those children died, she sent him out to pick up dinner and medication. The moment his car left the driveway, she did it.
That’s not a system failure. That’s a choice. A terrible, monstrous choice made in a terrible mind, maybe. But a choice nonetheless.
And yet the women outside the courthouse have decided Patrick is the villain. The man who lost all three of his children and his wife in one evening. The man who came home to that. He’s the bad guy in their story. I have questions for whoever is running this movement, and my first one is: what in the world is wrong with you people?
We spent decades demanding women be treated as full moral actors. Capable of running companies, commanding troops, leading nations. And the second a woman does something unspeakable, suddenly she’s a puppet of “the system” and a voice in her head and the patriarchy and whatever else fits the narrative. You can’t have it both ways. Either women are responsible for their actions or they aren’t. You don’t get to be a CEO on Tuesday and a blameless child on Wednesday.
Cora, Dawson, and Callan can’t make TikToks. They can’t organize rallies. They can’t wear matching pink shirts. They can’t tell us what they saw in their last moments, though we know what it was. They saw their mother. The person God put on this earth to love and protect them above all others.
A jury will decide whether Clancy’s mental state absolves her under the law. That’s their job, and I’ll trust the process. But a culture that looks at three dead babies and decides the real tragedy is their killer’s suffering? That’s not compassion. That’s moral rot. And the fact that it took a crowd of mothers holding their own living children to make that plain tells you everything about where we are.