Lindsay Clancy’s supporters say they are raising awareness about postpartum mental health. But their pink shirts, sympathetic slogans, and public displays have placed the accused killer—not her children—at the emotional center of the story.
Hundreds of supporters recently assembled outside a Massachusetts courthouse wearing pink. Some carried messages declaring that Lindsay Clancy needed help. Others offered peace, solidarity, and belief.
It was an impressive display of public sympathy.
The problem is that Clancy’s three children could not be there to see it.
Cora was five years old. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. Their mother killed them inside the family home in January 2023. Her attorneys do not dispute that fact. The legal battle concerns whether postpartum psychosis left her unable to bear criminal responsibility for what she did.
That is a serious legal question. It deserves serious medical testimony, careful deliberation, and a jury willing to distinguish emotional reaction from the requirements of the law.
But the spectacle outside the courthouse was not a psychiatric evaluation or a sober debate about criminal responsibility. It was a public campaign of identification with the woman who killed three defenseless children.
And that should disturb us.
Compassion Has Been Pointed in the Wrong Direction
Postpartum mental illness is real. Women experiencing severe depression, psychosis, suicidal thoughts, hallucinations, or impulses to harm themselves need immediate intervention. Families and medical professionals must take those symptoms seriously.
Acknowledging that does not require turning an accused killer into the symbolic victim of her own children’s deaths.
Yet that is exactly how much of the public discussion has developed. Clancy is described as overwhelmed, failed, isolated, overmedicated, misunderstood, and deprived of sufficient support. Every institutional failure and personal difficulty is placed under a microscope.
Her children increasingly appear as supporting characters in a tragedy supposedly centered on her suffering.
That moral inversion is difficult to ignore. Three children lost their lives, but the organized public display is devoted to reassuring the person who ended them that she is seen, believed, and supported.
Where are the shirts bearing the children’s names? Where are the crowds demanding that Cora, Dawson, and Callan remain at the center of the story? Where is the cultural energy insisting that their lives cannot be reduced to evidence in an adult’s mental-health narrative?
Compassion is not morally meaningful merely because it is intense. It also matters where that compassion is directed.
Mental Illness Can Explain an Act Without Making It Disappear
The justice system has long recognized that profound mental illness can affect criminal responsibility. That principle is neither radical nor inherently soft. A person completely detached from reality may not possess the same moral or legal capacity as someone acting with clear intent.
The jury must determine whether that standard applies here.
But too many spectators have already moved beyond explanation and into absolution. Their reasoning seems to be that if Clancy was suffering, judgment itself becomes cruel.
That is a dangerous standard.
Human beings frequently do terrible things while suffering. Addiction, trauma, depression, desperation, anger, and mental illness can all influence behavior. Understanding those conditions may change how society assigns punishment. It does not require pretending the victims have become less important.
A civilized society must be capable of holding two thoughts at once: a defendant may have been gravely ill, and the lives she took still demand justice.
The courthouse supporters appear interested primarily in the first half of that sentence.
The Politics of Automatic Identification
There is also a broader cultural instinct at work. Modern identity politics trains people to locate the approved victim category first and consider individual conduct second.
A suffering mother fits the preferred narrative. Her pain becomes systemic. Her failures become institutional. Her decisions become symptoms of forces surrounding her.
The children, meanwhile, have no political constituency. They cannot post videos, organize rallies, describe their trauma, or explain what was taken from them. Their helplessness makes them easy to honor abstractly and easier to forget emotionally.
This is how accountability disappears. The individual is absorbed into a favored group, responsibility is redistributed across society, and the most sympathetic explanation becomes the only acceptable interpretation.
Anyone who asks where personal responsibility fits is accused of lacking compassion.
But compassion without moral judgment is not compassion. It is sentimentality. And when sentimentality consistently favors the powerful adult over the defenseless child, it becomes something uglier.
Imagine the Reaction If the Defendant Were Different
The public response would almost certainly look different if the accused were a father surrounded by hundreds of male supporters wearing matching shirts.
Would the media describe such a demonstration primarily as an effort to raise awareness about men’s mental health? Would sympathetic commentators search his marriage, medical treatment, workload, and private anxieties for a narrative that shifted attention away from the children?
Or would the gathering be treated as evidence of a culture making excuses for male violence?
The question answers itself.
Our culture correctly demands that men remain accountable even when they have experienced hardship, depression, isolation, or psychological instability. Their suffering may be considered, but it rarely becomes a prohibition against judgment.
Women deserve access to serious mental-health treatment. They also deserve to be regarded as morally capable adults rather than permanent dependents whose actions must always be blamed on someone or something else.
Equality cannot mean agency when a woman succeeds and automatic absolution when she commits the unthinkable.
Remember Their Names
The jury will hear the evidence and decide whether Lindsay Clancy was legally responsible for killing her children. People outside the courtroom do not possess all the testimony, medical records, or instructions that will guide that decision.
But the public can still make a moral choice about whom it places at the center of the story.
The supporters chose Lindsay.
They wore her color, repeated messages for her, and organized their demonstration around her pain. Whatever their intentions, the result was a spectacle in which the woman who killed three children received the visible solidarity that her victims could no longer receive.
Postpartum psychosis should be studied. Warning signs should be recognized. Mothers in crisis should receive help before tragedy occurs. None of that requires transforming a courtroom defendant into a cultural heroine.
Three children are dead.
Before America forms another heart with its hands for the adult who killed them, it might pause long enough to remember the children who will never grow up.
Cora. Dawson. Callan.
Their names should come first.
Naomi Carter is a conservative columnist whose work focuses on women, identity politics, gender, race, media, and the cultural institutions influencing younger Americans. Carter became increasingly skeptical of progressive politics after seeing complex questions of identity reduced to rigid ideological categories. Her writing challenges political orthodoxies on both race and gender while emphasizing individual agency, personal responsibility, free expression, and equal treatment under the law. At The Dispatch Room, Carter frequently examines how political narratives are created, amplified by media and institutions, and ultimately experienced by ordinary people.
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