Column · 4 September 2026
3 lectures
Behind the pink shirts, three dead children
Three children strangled in a basement. A mother who denies nothing. And three years later, women in pink outside the courthouse, TikToks of living babies being rocked to the caption Same, Lindsay. The Clancy case is no longer only a trial about postpartum psychosis. It is a portrait of a double standard — and of a culture willing to stand behind the most unforgivable act, so long as the person who did it is a woman.
Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was not yet one.
On January 24, 2023, in Duxbury, Massachusetts, Lindsay Clancy sent her husband out for takeout. Then she strangled their three children in the basement. She tried to kill herself, survived, and was left paralyzed from the waist down. She does not deny what she did. The 2026 trial is not about who killed them. It is about one question: was she criminally responsible?
Outside the courthouse, women in pink gather. “She needed help.” “I could have been Lindsay.” GoFundMes. Solidarity that does not address the three dead children, but the woman who killed them.
That is the dystopian turn. Not only the crime. The spectacle around the crime.
The baby as a prop
The coldest format came from TikTok. A mother rocks or nurses her infant. Tears. Underneath: a line from Clancy’s journal, read in court. Caption: Same, Lindsay. Sometimes: “This could be you.”
A living child, unable to consent, is placed inside a tribute to a woman who killed her own. The baby is no longer a child. It is a prop. An aesthetic hostage.
Postpartum illness is real. Exhaustion is real. Thousands of mothers live through both and do not act. Filming your own baby to put your face next to that of a woman who killed her children is not “breaking a taboo.” It is pulling a child into a story of identification with the killing of children.
Reverse the sex. Fathers rocking a baby while quoting the journal of a man who killed his three children, caption “Same, Patrick”: the platform would explode. Here, it was called sisterhood.
What the law can say — and what it cannot wash away
Postpartum psychosis exists. It is rare. The defense argues illness and overmedication. If the jury finds no criminal responsibility, Clancy goes to a state psychiatric hospital, not prison. That is a legal question. It belongs to medical records and a jury. Not a T-shirt. Not a Reel.
You can recognize mental illness without canonizing the act. You can demand better perinatal care without turning three dead children into a poster, and without seating a fourth — still alive — in front of a camera to validate the slogan.
The double standard
A father sends his wife out for dinner. He kills the three children. Do we imagine men shouting “Same, Patrick”? Rallies titled “He needed help”? Videos with a baby in their arms?
No one believes that. Tens of thousands of incarcerated men have mental illness. No one dresses them as icons. No one says “we are all him.”
Millions of women give birth, burn out, juggle several young children — and do not kill them. Why the identification with the one who did? Why put another child’s body in the frame to say so?
What it means to protect the act
No one writes: “Killing your children is good.” The move is quieter. The center of gravity shifts. The victims become scenery. The mother becomes the subject. The medical system becomes the real defendant. The husband becomes a suspect by default. And the last trick: a living baby is used to humanize the woman who killed hers.
Illness can explain a collapse. It does not require a crowd in pink. It does not authorize Same. It does not erase three names.
The jury will decide: prison, hospital, or a hung jury. A column is not a thirteenth juror.
We do not need the verdict for this: “it could have been me” is not empathy. Filming your baby to say it is something else — pulling a child into a liturgy that places a crowd behind a woman who killed her own, while Cora, Dawson, and Callan are still waiting to be named first.
Emmanuelle Beauchamp
