Lindsay Clancy’s Post-Partum Depression Doesn’t Make Killing Her Children Okay

Lindsay Clancy is on trial for strangling her three young children to death in January 2023.

Her defense claims postpartum psychosis left her unable to form criminal intent. Yet the wave of public sympathy focused almost entirely on Clancy’s suffering has drawn sharp criticism from pro-life voices who insist the children’s deaths cannot be secondary to their mother’s mental health crisis.

Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse, has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months. On January 24, 2023, while her then-husband was briefly out of their Duxbury home picking up dinner and medicine, she strangled the children with exercise bands in the basement.

She then cut her wrists and neck and jumped from a second-story window in a suicide attempt. Callan died three days later.

Click Follow below to like the LifeNews Facebook page!

Prosecutors say Clancy acted intentionally and rationally.

Her attorneys argue severe postpartum mental illness, including psychosis, bipolar disorder and the effects of psychiatric medications, rendered her not criminally responsible. She had sought help for months—calling a suicide hotline, entering an outpatient program and spending five days in a psychiatric hospital before being discharged 19 days prior to the killings.

Outside the courthouse, Clancy supporters have appeared in pink, organized rallies and filled social media with defenses centered on failures of maternal mental-health care. A fundraiser for Clancy’s parents has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But one key leader says that while three is an understanding of the mental health issues some pregnant women face after birth, it doesn’t justify killing the children.

Abby Johnson, CEO and founder of And Then There Were None and ProLove Ministries, who herself experienced postpartum psychosis after the birth of one of her children, said the intense identification with Clancy reveals a deeper moral distortion long cultivated by abortion advocacy.

“I am not arguing that compassion for Lindsay is wrong…What concerns me is something different. We have become extraordinarily practiced at looking at a dead child and asking first what his or her mother was going through. And abortion taught us how to do that. For decades, the defense of abortion has depended on shifting the moral center of the story away from the human being who dies and toward the human being experiencing the crisis. The mother’s suffering becomes the justification. But suffering does not make killing good,” Johnson wrote.

Johnson stressed that mental illness may affect legal culpability without changing the moral nature of the act.

“Mental illness may affect a person’s culpability for an act. It does not change the moral nature of the act itself,” she said. “Cora was five years old. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. Their mother killed them.”

That last fact is not disputed. The jury must decide only whether Clancy was criminally responsible.

Johnson argued that culture has spent more than 50 years training itself to begin with a mother’s fear, financial stress, lack of support or depression until the child’s humanity nearly disappears—first in abortion and now in cases like this one.

“We can demand better postpartum mental-health care in their names. We can acknowledge that their mother may have been gravely ill. We can pray for Lindsay,” Johnson wrote. “None of that requires us to forget where the greatest irreversible harm occurred. Three children went to bed on January 24, 2023, in the home where they were supposed to be safest. They will never get to grow up.”

Whatever the jury decides about Clancy’s legal responsibility, pro-life advocates maintain the central truth remains unchanged: postpartum depression or psychosis does not make killing children okay.

Cora, Dawson and Callan cannot be allowed to become peripheral to their own story.