Two mothers' court battles and the case for reproductive justice

Call for maternal support, bodily autonomy, and greater scrutiny of surrogacy.[Courtesy]

Lindsay Clancy, the American mother who is on trial after her children were found murdered and she seemingly confessed to having committed the harm, has, over the past two weeks, generated extensive conversation over the limits of mental illness. More philosophically, in the past week, the ongoing case has forced a difficult question into the centre of public consciousness: What happens when a woman becomes dangerously unwell because of childbirth, and what responsibility does society have to intervene before illness becomes a catastrophe? Clancy is accused of killing her three children, aged five, three and eight months, in January 2023 before attempting to take her own life. Her defence does not dispute that she caused their deaths but instead argues that she was experiencing postpartum psychosis and was therefore not criminally responsible for her actions.

This horrifying case presents those with a conscience with the reality that two things can be true at once: Three children died in an unspeakable tragedy at the hands of their mother, and the woman accused of killing them may have been profoundly ill and therefore acted without rational malice. Holding those truths together is difficult because our public discourse has little patience for complexity when the person at the centre of a tragedy is a woman, and especially a mother. We are accustomed to imagining motherhood as the ultimate expression of female virtue, with women being expected to endure pregnancy, birth, sleeplessness, hormonal upheaval, breastfeeding, physical recovery and the relentless demands of infant care with gratitude. In our individualist, modern societies, when a woman cannot do this happily, she is frequently treated as deficient, rather than being provided with the support that she needs. When she becomes mentally unwell, the failure becomes hers, and should that illness produce tragic consequences, compassion becomes almost impossible.