Last Friday the Lindsay Clancy trial ended in a mistrial.
If you don't know the case: in 2023, Lindsay Clancy, a labor and delivery nurse in Massachusetts, killed her three children, Cora, five, Dawson, three, and Callan, eight months old, and then tried to take her own life. She survived, paralyzed from the waist down. Her defense was postpartum psychosis. Her husband, the father of those kids, told a reporter: I wasn't married to a monster. I was married to someone who got sick.
The internet lost its mind. There were people calling to repeal the 19th Amendment over it. A sick woman does the unthinkable, and the takeaway for a significant portion of the public is that women can't be trusted with basic rights.
Before we go any further, let's ask the question the coverage never asked. While Lindsay Clancy was dominating national headlines for weeks, how many other parents killed their children in this country? And who were they?
According to the most comprehensive study of filicide in the United States, a 25-year analysis of NIBRS data covering 3,974 incidents from 1999 to 2023, published in 2026, fathers and male perpetrators commit approximately 60% of filicides. Mothers and female perpetrators commit approximately 40%. On average, around 450 to 500 children are killed by a parent in the United States every year. That means while the Clancy trial ran for more than a month and dominated national conversation, somewhere between 37 and 42 other children were killed by a parent. The majority of those perpetrators were male. Yet none of those cases received anything approaching the coverage given to this one.
That is not an accident.
The media does not cover news. It covers stories that serve a purpose. And the purpose of the Lindsay Clancy coverage, the weeks of trial footage, the hot takes, the repeal the 19th Amendment posts, was not to inform the public about postpartum psychosis or maternal mental health or the systemic failures that allow a woman to reach a breaking point without intervention. The purpose was to produce a specific emotional response in a specific audience. Horror at a mother. Rage at a woman. And then a very clean leap to: women cannot be trusted.
This is how the machine works. You don't need a conspiracy. You need an algorithm that rewards outrage, an audience primed to receive it, and a political movement that has already identified women's autonomy as a target. The ingredients were all there. Lindsay Clancy was handed through the machine and it did exactly what it was meant to do.
Project 2025, the governing blueprint now being implemented by this administration, explicitly frames women's place in society around motherhood and the family unit as defined by one specific religious tradition. It calls for the elimination of federal protections for reproductive rights, the legal redefinition of sex to exclude gender identity, and the dismantling of programs that give women economic independence from the family structure it wants to mandate. The architects of that project understand, as they have always understood, that controlling women requires first making the public comfortable with the idea that women cannot be trusted to govern themselves. You do that incrementally, through culture, through media, through the careful selection of which stories get amplified and what moral the audience is guided toward.
A mother who killed her children in a documented psychiatric break is genuinely useful to that project. A father who killed his family, which happens statistically more often, is not. So the mother gets the months of coverage and the calls to strip constitutional rights, and the fathers get two days in the local news and a description of financial pressure.
Fathers are significantly more likely to kill multiple children in a single incident, significantly more likely to kill older children, and significantly more likely to have a documented history of violent offenses and substance abuse prior to the killing.
When men annihilate their families in this country, the language is almost always about pressure, about snapping, about a good man who reached his breaking point. We build them a story with a comprehensible arc. When a mother does it, especially one whose case involves a medical condition with a name and a treatment protocol, she becomes a monster, and the conversation immediately moves to what rights women in general deserve to have.
The pivot is not accidental and it's not new. It is a very old playbook applied to a current political moment.
Postpartum psychosis is real. It affects approximately 1 to 2 out of every 1,000 women who give birth, making it rare but not vanishingly so. It is distinct from postpartum depression, which is far more common and which most people have at least heard of. Postpartum psychosis is a psychiatric emergency. It involves hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, and a genuine break from reality. It can develop rapidly, within days of delivery, and without treatment it carries serious risk. With treatment, most women recover fully.
The question the coverage refused to ask is not whether Lindsay Clancy is evil. It is why nobody caught this before three children were gone. It is what it says about a healthcare system that a labor and delivery nurse, someone who worked inside that system every day, could reach a postpartum psychotic break without being identified and treated. It is why we are more comfortable spending months deciding whether one paralyzed woman is a monster than spending one week asking what systemic failures made this possible.
The systemic failures that produce outcomes like this one, inadequate maternal mental health care, a cultural narrative that treats mothers as superhuman until they break and then as monsters when they do, a political project actively dismantling the programs that give women access to healthcare and economic stability, are not accidents. They are features.
A country that takes seriously the mental health of new mothers, that funds postpartum care, that treats psychiatric breaks as medical emergencies rather than moral failures, is a country that is harder to manipulate with stories like this one. A country that has been trained to see sick women as monsters and to pivot immediately from individual tragedy to collective punishment is much easier.
There are mothers white-knuckling intrusive thoughts tonight, terrified to say a word, because they have watched what this country does to the ones who admit they are not okay. If that is you, you are not a monster. You are not broken. You are dealing with something that has a name and a treatment, and you deserve to be seen as a person who needs help, not a headline.
The National Maternal Mental Health Hotline is free, confidential, and available 24 hours a day. Call or text 1-833-TLC-MAMA.
