Lindsay Clancy does not deny that she murdered her three young children. In her trial, which is set to wrap up in the coming days, the facts of the case are virtually undisputed: In 2023 following months of devolving mental health and attempts to secure
mental health support, Clancy strangled her three children — ages five, three, and eight months — with rubber exercise chords. Shortly after, she attempted to end her own life by jumping out of the window of her family home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, and was paralyzed from the waist down.
Clancy admits to the murders, her ex-husband said when he testified on her behalf. The question at hand is whether or not Clancy — whom her lawyers say had been suffering from severe postpartum psychosis at the time of the murders — is criminally responsible for first-degree premeditated murder and deserving of a life sentence in federal prison, or should be committed to a state psychiatric facility.
In the true-crime obsessed network of internet commentary, the Clancy case has already produced thousands of hours of coverage, theorizing, and analysis. It also opened up a tricky conversation about maternal and post-natal psychiatric health, as well as the limitations of public sympathy.
Postpartum depression is defined by the Cleveland Clinic as a severe depressive mood disorder that can develop during pregnancy and up to a year after the birth of a child. Causes can relate to “hormonal, physical, emotional, financial and social changes after having a baby.” Postpartum psychosis is an extreme, more rare form of postpartum disorder, characterized by symptoms including “severe agitation, confusion, feelings of hopelessness, delusions or hallucinations, rapid speech and mania,” that can last weeks or months.
Even talking about the baby blues can be difficult for many women, and postpartum mental health is often a misunderstood and potentially fraught topic. This specific iteration is happening, of course, within the context of a murder trial over three children who should be alive, and the notion that Clancey may not hold the entirety of the responsibility for their deaths — be it shared with a severe mental illness, or medical and institutional failure — is being met with outrage and accusation of outright support for Clancy’s actions.
This has been particularly acute among hyper-online, right-wing men. Women discussing their own experience with postpartum depression, postpartum psychosis, and the mental health struggles that can follow the birth of a child, are themselves being labeled as soulless pro-baby-murder sociopaths.
The ringleader of this push is, to no one’s surprise, professional far right agitator — and definitely not a doctor — Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire. Walsh went so far as to declare that postpartum depression, and consequently postpartum psychosis, is an overblown diagnosis that masks a woman’s selfishness, and an unwillingness by new mothers to surrender themselves to the demands of motherhood. Walsh has spent days posting about the case, describing Clancy as a “useless woman” who expected “pampering and coddling” in order to prevent her from killing her children.
“Much of the ‘depression’ that parents (and not just moms) suffer after child birth is due not so much to hormones but to the fact that children, especially babies, are demanding and difficult and require us to subordinate our own needs and desires for their sake,” Walsh wrote. “The more selfish you are, the more of an adjustment it’s going to be.”
It’s worth noting that Walsh’s wife, Alissa Walsh, who gave birth to the couple’s six children, has had a more sympathetic view. In 2024, she responded to a fellow moms post on X about not “doing well” after giving birth with a supportive note. “Postpartum is not easy at all. Praying for you. Here to listen.”
Walsh and commentators like The Federalist’s Sean Davis continue to hold an uncompromising view of Clancy as a calculated murderess. Women who dare to push back on Walsh’s minimization of postpartum mental illness are — as Davis declared — “psychopaths,” who need to be “institutionalized.” MAGA conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec claimed that “there will be Lindsay Clancy copycats because of how the TikTok algorithm and radical feminist groups incentivize this evil behavior.”
Yet a crack is forming in the right’s coverage, and it’s exposing the gender dynamics of the modern conservative movement. Where right wing women are coming forward to correct blatant medical misinformation, and cruel minimization of their experience, only to be met with the kind of ire typically reserved for their liberal political opponents.
“As one of the few women left in conservative media who isn’t trying to live a trad wife life or peddle trad wife content — a lot of you sound so weird and mean talking about fertility, pregnancy, post partum,” former The View co-host Meghan McCain wrote on X. “You’re scaring the normies. And you’re gonna need them in ‘28.”
Abby Libby, a conservative influencer and mother of three, responded to Walsh by telling him that his posts were dismissive of the very real hormonal changes experienced by women after giving birth. Libby stressed that while she believed Clancy deserved the death penalty, “Your tirade against Lindsay has begun to extend in a cruel way to women who have brought life into the world and struggled.”
“Sitting with my 3rd baby in 3 years, 5 weeks postpartum, finding out from Matt Walsh that the reason I’m struggling with PPD for the 3rd time is that I’m selfish,” Libby wrote in another post.
Right wing commentator and Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren said on her podcast that while murder is inexcusable, there are a lot of men on the right “who will never give birth or have never experienced postpartum [and] they think that women who are empathizing with her are condoning murder.”
“Nobody is saying that. What women are saying is, ‘I went through it, or I know somebody who went through it,’ and damn, there’s got to be a better way than putting people on a cocktail of drugs or just telling them, ‘Oh, you don’t like being a mom? Get over it,’” she added.
Former Trump Communications Director Alyssa Farah Griffin, also a current co-host on The View, wrote on X that “no serious person is saying psychosis exonerates Clancy. Many of us are saying the medical and mental health system first and foremost failed her innocent children — but also her — and that deserves to be interrogated.”
“Three children are dead after a woman tried dozens of times to get help she needed. That does not mean she shouldn’t face either life in prison or an institution. Civil societies attempt to learn from horrible things that happen so they can be avoided in the future,” the host added.
Even right wing men were appalled by some of Walsh’s commentary. The Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro avoided calling out his coworker by name, but implored an unnamed individual to “please, please, please, stop being a moron.”
“Post-partum depression is quite real. Post-partum psychosis is real but also distinct. People who conflate the two are being foolish. People who dismiss either are being ridiculous,” Shapiro wrote in a separate social media post.
Fellow Daily Wire co-Founder — and Walsh’s former boss — Jeremy Boreing wrote that Clancy “deserves our sympathy. Postpartum depression is real. Hormonal shock, exhaustion to the point of hallucination… And the system clearly failed her – responding to her pleas for help with a spastic spate of mindaltering drugs.”
“My heart breaks for her,” he added. “Also she should receive the death penalty.” This is, of course, the far right we’re talking about.
Second Amendment activist Chris Loesch accused Walsh and others of engaging in “click bait engagement farming.”
“Calling a documented endocrine event a character flaw is not tough-mindedness,” he wrote.
The contemporary right has openly embraced natalism — the promotion of large families as part of a political project — as a cultural marker of their movement. Get married (ideally young), have babies (ideally also young), lots of babies, and raise them to be good conservatives. But the clash over the Clancy trial reveals deep division in a movement dominated by male voices, where women — no matter how bonafide their political credentials — are often expected to accept the edicts of the loudest men in the room.
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