And honestly, look at how we treat mothers in this country after they give birth.
The U.S. is the only OECD country with no national paid maternity leave. Meanwhile, mothers in other developed countries routinely get months of paid leave, home visits, postpartum care, and actual time to recover.
The U.S. maternal mortality rate is 17.9 deaths per 100,000 births, and we still have the highest maternal mortality rate among wealthy countries. Nearly 2 out of 3 maternal deaths happens postpartum.
Our infant mortality rate is also worse than a lot of comparable countries: about 5.5 deaths per 1,000 births in the U.S, compared with around 1.5 in Sweden, 1.7 in Japan, and 2.0 in Norway.
We expect women to give birth, recover physically, survive on no sleep, care for a newborn, keep a household running, and often go back to work within weeks.
Then when a mother falls apart, everyone asks what’s wrong with her instead of asking what’s wrong with the way we treat mothers here, it’s sickening.
I’m a mother. I had severe postpartum OCD and anxiety. I know what it feels like to be terrified by your own brain after having a baby. I got through it because I had an incredibly supportive husband and a doctor who regularly called and texted to make sure I was okay.
Lindsay Clancy was asking for help too. In the four months before her children died, she was prescribed 13 different psychiatric medications by multiple providers, more than 30 prescriptions total.
Before you reduce this case to “evil mother,” ask why a postpartum woman could repeatedly seek psychiatric help, take that many medications, become increasingly unwell, and still end up at home in that condition.
And this is part of a much bigger problem. Our system is very good at writing prescriptions and much worse at actually supporting women postpartum. There is far more money in medication than there is in months of therapy, sleep support, home help, frequent follow-up, and someone actually looking at the whole person.
That does not mean psychiatric medication is bad. It saves lives. But if a woman is given 13 different medications in four months and is still deteriorating, “she was being treated” should not end the conversation. It should start a much harder one about why she was getting worse while everyone kept changing the prescription.
Postpartum psychosis is super rare, roughly 1–2 per 1,000 births, but it can involve hallucinations, delusions, and a complete break from reality.
You can grieve those children, hold the horror of what happened, and still recognize that this woman appears to have been failed long before that night.
If your only takeaway is hatred for the mother, you’re ignoring the part of this tragedy that could actually prevent the next one.
On average, a man commits an act of family annihilation once every 5 days in the US.
Men are already murdering their wives and children and y’all stay fucking silent about it.