Before you read this column beyond this sentence, if you are reading it today, 6 September 2026 or a date closer to it, open a separate tab and go to google.com and type "my wife is yelling at me" in the search box, then, without leaving, change "wife" to "husband." Whatever you just noticed illustrates one reason there's so much attention on the Lindsay Clancy filicide case. To many people, Lindsay Clancy is the human face of one recurrent assertion in gender politics: women get a pass for their bad habits, not men. The little Google experiment you just did is not just to show how "no help for men" inheres in systems but, perhaps more importantly, how men are seen as a threat that should be helped against, not helped.
Lindsay Clancy, 36, a nurse and mother of three—5, 3, and 8-month-old—killed all three of her children after sending her husband on an errand. She attempted to kill herself too. The facts of the case are extant, and you may find a dossier in The Guardian for insight. The defence for the killing is postpartum depression, which has divided people from the US to various parts of the world. The division hinges on several implications that the filicide has for gender politics and all matters subsumed in it—equity, fair hearing, equal rights, judgemental bias, familial and societal considerations in gendered conversations, et cetera. Essentially, this case has proven to be a boiling point where any outcome tilts major arguments for one gender and against the other. Is Lindsay Clancy a criminal or not? That is the question.
To answer that question simply by saying yes or no is problematic, one is more than the other. A person who has taken the life of another person, let alone three, is a killer, but the legal gaze peers at cases differently. It is the complexity of the law that partly makes answering the question problematic. Intents and purposes are considered important factors. What your answer is depends largely on what you are overtly or covertly convinced that the intentions and or purposes of Lindsay Clancy were. To say that she is not a criminal is to say that her conditions take precedence over the actions claimed to be tied to them, that she did not willingly kill her children. To say that she is a criminal is to admit that, conditions be damned, a crime is a crime and she has to answer for killing her children. The two positions are problematic for different reasons.
Let us start with the second one. To say that Lindsay Clancy is a criminal is to complicate our perception of mental illnesses, especially ones associated with childbirth. We are ignoring the questions of what else we may do to facilitate care for women who are or may likely be suffering from postpartum mental illnesses. (Or, we are simply saying "this is not the time for any of those"). To hang Lindsay Clancy is effectively a deterrent only insofar as mental conditions do not cause intrusion into the thoughts and decision making capacities of women who may suffer them. Taking Lindsay Clancy's life does not close the Pandora's Box we have in this case. Clancy herself had passed a judgement, however warped her mental state was: she'd rather die than live with what she did.
One question: could all of this have been avoided, were the children placed in care of family until Lindsay Clancy got in normal mental condition?
The other side of this high-profile case makes it difficult to lay the blame of inconsideration on the side that thinks that Lindsay Clancy is an outright criminal. Several attempts to defend Lindsay Clancy in the courts of public opinion are riddled with biases and fallacies. One woman says that, to get it that Lindsay Clancy is not a criminal, an analogy of children as priceless ceramic pieces in a museum crushed by a hypothetically epileptic Lindsay Clancy would suffice. A renowned Nigerian virtual voice, owner of Diary of a Naija Girl (DANG), who earlier in the year declared that pedophiles, no regard to any pretext of mental issues they have, earn no sympathy from her, has a different view on the matter. In Lindsay Clancy's case, she argued her support for Lindsay Clancy, citing mental health reasons.
The woman who situated the killing as an accident at the museum perpetuated a fallacy by weak analogy. Lindsay Clancy, as the facts of the mistrial (credit to one holdout juror) have shown, did not happen to have killed her children—not the way you fall on or hit a ceramic material and they break. She did kill her three children. If one were to concede for a moment that an accident in her case assumes a different meaning, do we assume that it began at the point when she sent her husband on an errand and lasted until the killings were done? Or do we assume that the accident happened only at the points where she killed three humans? (Later in this article, I would like to place these questions beside some other asks.)
As for the owner of DANG, it is a case of goalpost shifting. Why does pedophilia (an adult having sex with a minor) rank above filicide (a parent killing their child) in her book? The two, horrible conducts as they are, have been linked to mental health problems. Pedophilia has been categorized as one of the 8 paraphilic disorders, with studies into its neurobiological underpinnings. There are genuine concerns that experts have raised, and while pedophiles do not get sympathy from the DANG owner on the back of any mental health finding, postpartum depression stands valid for a woman to kill her children. Her defence strikes as an instance of confirmation bias. Worse still, she blames it on the non-attentiveness of her husband and family. This is outright circular reasoning.
Away from weak analogy and goalpost shifting, the women who have gathered behind Lindsay Clancy like she is a cult hero bring more to the fore in gender politics. There has been an over-subscribed fundraiser of 1 million dollars to support her. What does it mean to support a woman who killed her children? What would this mean if this was done for a man who does the same thing? If the Google searches at the beginning of this article are anything to go by, I think the answers are more obvious than not. The outrage from those who say that Lindsay Clancy is a criminal is well justified here: if a pedophile, by reason of mental weakness, cannot be pardoned, a woman who commits filicide should not be acquitted on the grounds of postpartum depression.
Should Lindsay Clancy not be found guilty eventually, her case will become an over-flogged reference to justify what would otherwise have been punished as crimes. It would also impact women in several societal institutions, as many commenters on the matter have pointed out. The Pandora's Box that we cannot close is that we have a gender politics that sees sanity as mutually exclusive: the man as the natural criminal; the woman as the natural victim. On this axis, the victimhood of men is less considered, the criminality of women is less punished; the criminality of men is a given, the victimhood of women is an established condition. The danger of this divide is seen in the crisis of opinions we have in the struggle to admit that one gender is in the box we have consistently boxed the other gender in. That is why arguing it as an accident, if not framing, comes naturally to many.
As I asked earlier, if one were to concede for a moment that an accident in her case assumes a different meaning, do we assume that it began at the point when she sent her husband on an errand and lasted until the killings were done? If this was true, would it be true for a rapist that theirs can also validly be an act done out of a sustained mental disorder? Would it now be (more) acceptable for homicide to say the suspect was under momentary malady?
Or, I ask again, do we assume that the accident happened only at the points where she killed three humans? What implication does that mean for other crimes that may be argued with mental struggles?
A part of me wishes Lindsay Clancy had not had postpartum depression, had had a smoother ride into motherhood, had remained healthy, because the case that her condition has led to will impact lives beyond measure. Already, Corie Walsh, a woman who has been invested in the Clancy, has also allegedly committed a filicide by killing her 2-year-old. It is unconscionably terrifying to think that we would have an acceptable defence for murdering children, for hurting minors, for murdering or hurting anyone at all. While that is horrible, it is also potentially dangerous, this case that tentatively ended in a mistrial, the counterproductiveness that it will be in the larger rights and opportunities extended to women, in leadership, in business, in societal institutions like law, security establishments.
Since, necessarily, actions will attract consequences, would it be fair to make women (and, maybe, men) sign agreements that their decisions would not be affected by manic episodes before they could be trusted with responsibilities? That if they default, they should be punished anyway? Would that be extreme? Should we begin to consider that, like incurable diseases, some mental struggles are only completely gone when their hosts are dead? Would it be fair to euthanize that view? Or should mental health problems remain blind spots of law and retribution when the affected people surrender to their impulses?
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