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CONTENT WARNING: This article covers child homicide and mental health issues.
Clancy is being tried on murder charges for killing her three young children. The tragedy has resurrected debates over whether such women are criminals or victims.
Tasha Kenney woke up at 4am on Thursday, donned a pink T-shirt
and drove to the courthouse in Plymouth, Massachusetts, to show support for Lindsay Clancy, the mother on trial for killing her three young children.
Kenney, a teacher who lives 90 minutes away, joined hundreds of other pink-clad women gathered on the courthouse lawn because she had suffered from severe postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter a decade ago. She believes the Clancy children could have been saved if the warning signs had been heeded.
As Americans have been riveted by the televised trial of a woman accused of the most incomprehensible of crimes, the Clancy family’s tragedy has become a case in point for all manner of perceived societal ills.
For many, it is evidence that the United States neglects new mothers and fails to properly care for maternal mental health. Others are outraged that the methodical killing of three innocents could be treated as anything other than murder. They see the nearly $1 million (NZ$1.67m) that has been donated to a fund for Clancy’s parents as evidence of “cultural rot”.
Jonathan Hatami, a child abuse prosecutor in Los Angeles County, said in an interview that he was disturbed that people seemed more worried about Clancy than the children – ages 5, 3 and 8 months – that she has admitted to having killed.
While there are important issues that need attention, he said, “We can’t be killing children and then say, ‘Oh, I’m happy now that mental health is being discussed.’”
Perhaps all the gnashing of teeth should come as no surprise. The question of how mothers who kill their children should be dealt with is perennially unsettled, and the Clancy case has been supercharged by cultural divides and clickbait.
“We can’t really look away,” said Michelle Oberman, a legal scholar who has studied cases of mothers who kill. “It is just stunning and epic, in the magnitude of loss and the unthinkability of the crime.”
Twenty-five years ago, the country was equally riveted by a strikingly similar case. Andrea Yates, who like Clancy was a nurse, drowned her five children in the bathtub. Like Clancy’s defence, Yates’ centred on the claim that she was suffering from profound psychosis.
Yates wanted to be executed because she believed that the devil lived within her, her lawyer, George Parnham said on Thursday.
The jury found her guilty, but she was granted a new trial. The second jury acquitted her by reason of insanity.
Since then, mental illness has become less stigmatised, Oberman said. “We don’t think about people who struggle mentally as automatically just not tough enough, malingerers – just fakers – in the way that we might have 20, 30 years ago,” she said.