I keep coming back to the same unsettling question every time another high-profile case like this hits the headlines. How does a mother who ends the lives of her own children suddenly become someone others feel compelled to defend, raise money for, and even claim to understand on a personal level? It is not abstract theory. Three young children lost their lives in a quiet Massachusetts home. Their mother has not denied what she did. Yet a noticeable group of women online has turned the story into something that looks a lot like solidarity theater.
The facts are straightforward and heavy. In late January 2023, Lindsay Clancy used exercise bands to strangle her five-year-old daughter Cora, her three-year-old son Dawson, and her eight-month-old son Callan in the basement of the family house in Duxbury. She then injured herself severely and jumped from a second-story window, leaving her paralyzed. Her legal team does not contest the killings. They argue she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis and therefore not criminally responsible. Prosecutors say the acts were intentional and planned. The trial continues, with the defense now presenting its side after the state called dozens of witnesses.
The Online Turn Toward Sympathy
What has captured attention is not only the courtroom drama but the reaction outside it. A fundraiser set up by Clancy’s parents has climbed past the nine-hundred-thousand-dollar mark, drawing support from more than twenty-seven thousand people and aiming higher still. The stated purpose is to cover travel, lodging, and living expenses while the parents stay near the trial. Comments on the page often lean heavily on mental health struggles and far less on the three children who will never grow up.
On short-video platforms the tone grows more intense. Some creators declare the case already decided in her favor, insisting the mere fact of the killings somehow proves the psychosis claim. Others go further and insist she is innocent despite admissions, despite her husband’s frantic emergency call, despite her own civil lawsuit language that acknowledges she killed the children. A few mothers film themselves holding their infants while talking about relating to Clancy. That combination has drawn sharp criticism, and understandably so.
I have watched enough of these clips to notice a pattern. The emphasis shifts almost immediately from the victims to the accused woman’s suffering. Mental illness is treated not as one factor among others but as a complete eraser of responsibility. The children become background details rather than the center of the story. That inversion feels significant.
Mental Illness And The Limits Of Explanation
Postpartum psychosis is real. It can be terrifying, disorienting, and dangerous. Research has documented cases where women experience hallucinations, extreme paranoia, and impulses that feel impossible to resist. Treatment exists, and early intervention matters. None of that is in dispute. The difficulty arises when the diagnosis is asked to do more work than it can carry.
In the Clancy case the defense presents a picture of rapid mental decline, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and medication struggles. Her mother has testified about those changes. Supporters online treat every detail as conclusive proof that criminal responsibility vanishes. Prosecutors point to planning and awareness. The jury will have to weigh both. Outside the courtroom, though, the conversation often skips that weighing process entirely.
I’ve found that many people struggle with the idea that someone can be both ill and still accountable. Illness can explain behavior without fully excusing it. Courts already consider mental state at sentencing and sometimes at the guilt phase. That system is imperfect, but it exists precisely because pure sympathy or pure condemnation both fall short. Turning a trial into a referendum on whether women should ever face full consequences risks flattening a complex reality.
Three children are dead because their mother killed them. That remains the central, undisputed fact no matter how the mental health evidence is interpreted.
Gender Solidarity Over Accountability
Observers of recent high-profile cases have pointed out a recurring refusal to accept female accountability when the facts feel inconvenient. The comparison to other public disputes is hard to ignore. When admissions exist, when evidence is substantial, a certain cohort still prioritizes protecting the woman over examining the harm done. The priority appears to be that women not be held fully responsible, even when the victims are children.
In one widely shared video a single mother stated that any man who believes Clancy should face prison for the killings probably abuses his wife. She added that she is still waiting for a man to prove good ones exist. The response online was swift and largely unsympathetic. Critics noted that the women who claim to search for decent partners sometimes overlook patterns in their own choices, and that demanding men prove themselves by refusing to call a child killer a child killer is a strange inversion of standards.
This is not about dismissing mental health. It is about noticing when empathy becomes selective. The same voices that demand accountability in other contexts grow quiet or defensive when the accused is a woman and the narrative of victimhood is available. I’ve watched this dynamic play out enough times to recognize the discomfort it creates for people who simply want the children remembered first.
The Performance Of Identification
Perhaps the most striking element is the decision by some mothers to film themselves relating to Clancy while holding their own babies. The optics are jarring. Relating to a parent who killed her children is one thing. Doing so on camera with an infant in arms raises questions that go beyond ordinary sympathy. Critics have suggested child protective services should take notice. Whether that is the right response is debatable, but the unease is real.
These videos often carry a tone of performative understanding. The speaker positions herself as uniquely able to grasp the accused woman’s pain. The children who died receive less airtime than the speaker’s own emotional insight. It begins to look less like compassion and more like a search for meaning or attention in a story that should remain focused on irreversible loss.
In my experience, genuine empathy does not require public declaration while cradling a living child. Quiet support for better mental health resources, better screening, better postpartum care—those are constructive paths. Turning a triple killing into content that centers the killer’s narrative feels different. It risks normalizing a hierarchy where female suffering automatically outranks the lives of the youngest victims.
Fundraising And The Question Of Priorities
The GoFundMe totals are remarkable. Nearly a million dollars for parents supporting a daughter who has admitted the acts that ended three lives. Crowdfunding platforms have rules about funding criminal defense, and some observers have urged reports. Whether the campaign stays up or not, the volume of donations itself tells a story. Large numbers of people decided the parents’ travel and lodging costs deserved priority over other uses of that money.
Supportive comments frequently stress the mother’s mental health more than the children’s deaths. That framing is consistent across platforms. The medical system is blamed. The husband is sometimes cast as a villain in conspiracy theories that ignore the emergency call and the physical evidence. The accused woman’s own lawsuit language acknowledging the killings is waved away. The pattern is one of narrative protection.
I do not doubt that Clancy’s parents are devastated. Families of people who commit terrible acts often suffer secondary trauma. Helping them with practical costs during a long trial is a human impulse. The scale of the response, however, and the accompanying online rhetoric, suggest something larger than ordinary compassion. It looks like an investment in a particular story about women, mental health, and responsibility.
What The Spectacle Reveals
Step back from the individual case and the broader cultural signal becomes clearer. A noticeable segment of women appears more invested in protecting a female narrative of victimhood than in centering the murdered children. Mental illness is real and deserves serious attention. So do the three lives that ended in that basement. Treating the latter as secondary is a choice, not an inevitability.
The trial will decide questions of criminal responsibility according to the evidence and the law. Outside the courtroom the conversation has already decided something else: that solidarity with the accused mother feels more urgent than full acknowledgment of what she did. That priority shows up in the fundraising totals, the TikTok declarations of victory before any verdict, the videos filmed with infants in arms, and the insistence that men who want prison time must themselves be abusers.
None of this means every woman who expresses concern about postpartum care is part of the problem. Most are not. The issue is the subset that moves from concern to active identification with the killer, from support for better treatment to rejection of any meaningful accountability. That subset is loud enough and consistent enough to warrant examination.
Accountability Still Matters
Justice systems exist because societies decided long ago that certain acts require formal response even when the actor is suffering. Mental health can mitigate. It can explain. It rarely erases the fact of the act itself. Three children are not coming back. Their mother is the person who ended their lives. Holding both truths at once is difficult. It is also necessary.
The online transformation of this case into a cause for some women reveals a cultural reluctance, concentrated in a particular demographic, to prioritize murdered children over a preferred narrative of female victimhood. That reluctance does not help mothers who genuinely struggle with postpartum illness. It does not improve screening or treatment. It mainly protects a story that feels comforting to those telling it.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect is how quickly the conversation moves away from the victims. In ordinary moral reasoning the children would remain central. Here they become footnotes to a larger discussion about whether women can be fully blamed. That shift deserves more scrutiny than it usually receives.
I keep returning to the simple sequence of events. A mother killed her three children. She has not disputed the core facts. A large online response has chosen to center her pain, her parents’ costs, and her alleged lack of responsibility. The children receive less attention in that response than the narrative surrounding their mother. That imbalance is the story that stays with me.
Looking Ahead Without Softening The Facts
Better postpartum care, better access to psychiatric help, better education for families about warning signs—all of these are worth pursuing. None of them require turning a woman who killed her children into a symbol of misunderstood womanhood. The two efforts can coexist. In practice they often do not, because the symbolic project crowds out the practical one.
When mothers film themselves relating to a child killer while holding their own infants, something has gone wrong in the cultural conversation. When nearly a million dollars flows toward the parents of the accused while the children’s names fade from the discussion, priorities have shifted. When any call for prison is treated as evidence of male abusiveness, the standard of accountability has become selectively applied.
The jury will do its work. The rest of us can still insist that the three children remain the moral center of this story. Mental illness explains a great deal. It does not rewrite the basic sequence of what happened in that basement. Holding that line is not cruelty. It is the minimum required by the facts.
In the end the question that started this reflection remains open. Why do some women race to identify with a mother who killed her children? The answers that emerge online often circle back to gender solidarity, distrust of systems, and a preference for victim narratives. Those answers may feel emotionally satisfying to the people offering them. They do less for the children who can no longer speak. That gap between emotional satisfaction and basic moral priority is worth sitting with longer than a short video allows.
Three lives ended. Their mother ended them. Everything else is secondary, no matter how loudly the secondary claims demand center stage. Keeping that order clear is harder than it should be in the current climate. It remains necessary all the same.
