To women, Lindsay Clancy isnt a monster shes living proof of their worst fears

Lindsay Clancy committed the worst crime imaginable when she killed her three children. She was disturbingly methodical about it, tying an exercise band to a door in the basement of the family home and strangling each of her babies, Cora, then 5, Dawson, then three, and Callan, then just seven months, one at a time. How did she not stop, when they must have protested with fear and incomprehension? And then, even more disturbingly, left her three children — her youngest son not yet dead — alone in the last moments of their desperately short lives, as she went upstairs to try and take her own life. The only explanation is that she is a monster, of course. Or perhaps it isn’t. In the mass of social discourse, it’s impossible to miss that many women — especially mothers — do not accept that Clancy constructed a perfect-seeming life only to deliberately destroy it. Instead, they believe that while Clancy’s crime was heinous, it was a tragedy caused by a horrific health system failure. To those women, Clancy isn’t a poster girl, or a hero, or even a collective sainted “victim.” She is the living, breathing embodiment of every one of their greatest fears.This opinion has exploded chat forums on sites like Reddit, motivating women to share their own postpartum stories and traumas.It’s even driven hundreds of women to gather (perhaps misguidedly) outside the courtroom in which Clancy is being tried to offer their support. But to criticize these women who support Clancy — and who do not seek to transfer victimhood away from her children and onto her — is to fundamentally misunderstand what women are trying to say about this case. There are no children without mothers.

And if we do not center and protect mothers and care for them better and with more urgency, we risk endangering more families.  Suicide is now the leading cause of death for postpartum women in the US, according to the most recent national data. And many women who have giv...