PAIDOKTONIA : THE NAMES WE SHOULD NOT FORGET.

Cora. Dawson. Callan. I keep writing their names down because it is believed, somewhere in the churn of this case, that they will be quietly forgotten. Lindsay Clancy is a headline now. A symbol, even, of a healthcare system that failed her. Her children are a footnote to that symbol. I am not comfortable with that arrangement, and I don't think you should be either.Let me say the uncomfortable thing plainly: I believe Lindsay Clancy was mentally ill. I also believe she should be held accountable. I don't think these two positions cancel each other out. Postpartum psychosis is not an excuse people invent after the fact. It is a documented, terrifying collapse of reality, and it deserves to be taken seriously as exactly that. But central to this argument is a much harder question the trial exposed rather than resolved: does the presence of a real illness automatically erase the presence of a real choice? I don't think it does. Not always. Maybe not even usually.What strikes me most, working through the trial record, is how much of the prosecution's case rested not on cruelty but on sequence. Dawson taken to one room. Cora kept with Callan in another. A subtle, almost administrative logic to who died first and where — the kind of ordering, prosecutors argued, that a mind fully unmoored from reality doesn't usually manage. It is suspected by some legal observers that this detail did more damage to the state's own case than to the defense, since acknowledging her illness so openly, while insisting she still understood right from wrong, is an almost impossible needle to thread in front of a jury. Maybe that tension is exactly the point. Maybe the truth of postpartum psychosis is that it doesn't erase a person cleanly. It distorts. It does not necessarily delete. There's a detail from the hospital that I haven't been able to shake. Still intubated, unable to speak above a whisper, Clancy is reported to have asked whether she had a lawyer. Before grief. Before disbelief. A legal question, asked by someone who apparently understood, even in that state, that what had happened required defending. I don't offer that detail as proof of anything certain — I am wary of building a verdict out of one moment plucked from a hospital bed. But it is worth sitting with, uncomfortably, rather than explaining away.Here is where I part ways with the purest version of the insanity defense, the one that says severe psychosis should fully absolve a parent of any accountability at all. I understand the logic. If someone genuinely cannot distinguish right from wrong, punishing them the way we'd punish a calculated killer seems almost like punishing an illness itself. But full absolution asks us to treat the deaths of three children as an event with a cause and no consequence. It asks Cora, Dawson, and Callan to disappear into the diagnosis of the person who killed them. And I don't think justice can survive that kind of disappearing act. So what does accountability look like, if not a prison sentence? I keep landing on something closer to what a psychiatric facility, for the remainder of a life, actually is: not an escape from consequence, but a different shape of consequence. A life spent institutionalized, under treatment, carrying — assuming any lucidity returns to her at all — the full weight of what she did, is not nothing. It might, in its own bleak way, be heavier than a standard sentence with a release date at the end of it. There is no parole from what she'll have to live inside her own mind, if she is ever well enough to understand it fully.<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/1000228942.png"/>I also can't ignore the healthcare system sitting quietly at the edges of this entire case, mostly unindicted. A mother who told her husband and her mother she was having thoughts of harming her children, and did not tell the people whose job it was to intervene. Why withhold it from doctors and not from family? It is likely, though not something I can prove from outside the case, that some fear of losing her children factored into that silence, the same fear any parent facing a mandated reporter might carry. That fear does not indict the healthcare system on its own. But a system that makes disclosure feel more dangerous than silence is still a system worth interrogating, separately from the question of what Clancy herself is responsible for. Both things can be true. The system can have gaps. And Lindsay Clancy can still be responsible for what happened inside those gaps. Somewhere in this case is a comforting binary: either she is a monster who deserves no mercy, or she is a victim of illness who deserves no punishment. I don't believe in either version, honestly. I think the real answer is smaller and harder to sit with. A person can be genuinely unwell and still culpable. A society can extend compassion and still insist on consequence. And three children, whatever verdict eventually gets reached, do not get to weigh in on any of it. That's the part I keep returning to, long after the legal arguments blur together. Not what Lindsay Clancy understood in that house on Chestnut Street in January 2023. What Cora, Dawson, and Callan will never understand about anything again.Sometimes life happens, and it's devastating, and that's simply what's left. But devastating is not the same as blameless. I think we owe the children that distinction, even when it costs us the comfort of a clean answer.

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