David L. Ryan / The Boston Globe via Getty Images; Martin Rose / Bongarts / Getty Images
What the Lindsay Clancy Trial Reveals About America’s Failure to Support Mothers in Crisis
News of Lindsay Clancy’s triple-murder trial is flooding the Internet, and with it, conversations about postpartum depression. In January 2023, Lindsay Clancy killed her 5-year-old, 3-year-old and 8-month-old children before attempting suicide, which left her paralyzed from the waist down. The facts of their deaths are not up for debate in this Plymouth trial, but whether or not the severe postpartum psychosis, clinical depression and bipolar disorder Clancy was experiencing meant she was criminally insane.
Clancy’s mother-in-law explained Clancy was “begging for help” right before she killed her children. In December, just weeks before, she told her mother and then-husband Patrick (the couple are now divorced) that “she had thoughts of harming the children.”
The case has laid bare the failures of a U.S. mental healthcare system that did not protect Clancy or her children, and still leaves countless new mothers without adequate care.
While Clancy stands trial, people are mourning the loss of Hayden Panettiere, a child star who had long struggled with postpartum depression following the 2014 birth of her daughter, Kaya, and experienced domestic violence from her ex-boyfriend Brian Hickerson. This week, news outlets revisited Panettiere’s allegation that Neutrogena (one of her long-time partners) attempted to end her contract after she spoke honestly about her postpartum depression.
-
‘It’s Killing the Women You Represent’: Texas Widower’s Plea to Lawmakers to End Abortion Ban
-
Care Is Becoming America’s Strongest Form of Resistance
-
From North Carolina to Wisconsin, State Supreme Courts Are Political Battlegrounds
-
New Off-Broadway Play ‘The Body of Mary’ Takes on Reproduction, Narrative and Control
-
The Silence I Learned to Carry: Real Talk From a Male Survivor of Sexual Abuse
Get the Ms. Weekly News Digest:
Sign Up
Listen, Rate, Review and subscribe on:
-
Get the magazine and join the community
Become a Member -
Support Ms.
Donate
Feminist Daily Newswire
Feminist Majority Foundation
- Trump’s FDA Pick Raises Concerns Over Science, Abortion Access, and Food Safety
- Idaho Abortion Ban Blocked When Pregnancy Threatens Patient’s Health
- UN Experts: Five Years On, the World Must Not Normalize Taliban Rule
- North Carolina State Legislature Advances New Restrictions on Voting
- Massachusetts Expands Later Term Abortion Access
From the Magazine:
Get Ms.’s award-winning feminist reporting delivered directly to your mailbox!
-
Skye Perryman on How We Turn ‘Anger and Sorrow’ Into ‘Action’
“I know how you feel—because I’ve been there there too. On a bad day, and there are many bad days, our nation’s backslide from democracy into autocracy accelerates … Untrained, masked federal agents are running roughshod in our streets, terrorizing communities. Peaceful protesters have been killed. The government has been weaponized, and the Supreme Court feels stacked … It’s almost impossible to keep up; even harder to know what to do.”
So begins Skye Perryman’s sobering but hopeful and practical new book, Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times. Though this handbook for hard times is elevated by a we’re-all-in-it-together spirit, Perryman, an attorney and president and CEO of Democracy Forward, doesn’t sugarcoat what we’re all facing.
“We have to acknowledge that there is no cavalry coming to protect us,” she writes. “No knight in shining armor to save us from the situation we are in. It’s up to us. We are the people who decide what happens next.” And while daunting, she says “it can also be empowering to know how essential we are in the fight for freedom and our democracy.”
Perryman fervently believes that action is antidote. By “reclaiming our collective power,” and by using the “tools that ordinary people have used in extraordinary times before us,” she insists that together we can “fight for freedom today, build for a better tomorrow.”
Matilda Joslyn Gage: The Most Radical Suffragist Written Out of History Is Still Urgently Relevant
Matilda Joslyn Gage was one of the most radical voices of the 19th-century women’s rights movement—and one of the most deliberately forgotten. Alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, she helped build the suffrage movement, but Gage pushed further, challenging not only women’s political exclusion but also patriarchal religion, sexual violence, economic inequality and the erasure of women’s accomplishments from history.
Gage paired those radical ideas with bold action. She protested the 1886 unveiling of the Statue of Liberty because women themselves had no political liberty; refused to pay taxes without representation; and wrote Woman, Church and State, a blistering critique of Christianity’s role in legitimizing women’s subordination. Her willingness to confront institutions other suffragists feared alienating ultimately helped push her out of the movement’s mainstream history.
A century later, Gage’s warnings feel strikingly current. As voting rights, bodily autonomy and the separation of church and state once again come under attack, her insistence that women understand their own history—and see themselves as part of a struggle extending across generations—offers both a warning and a call to action.
