What is Sin?

Ms Clancy, 36, who was raised Catholic, does not deny strangling her children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months — at her home in Duxbury, Mass., an affluent suburb of Boston, in January 2023. 

When you read the reporting, it would have stirred something deep within you.

If you are a woman diagnosed with postpartum psychosis, you may empathise with Lindsay Clancy despite her actions. Postpartum psychosis is a condition that affects a mother after the delivery of the child – from the strain of the delivery and the sleepless nights thereafter for a length of time, depending on the baby’s health condition. Lindsay Clancy suffered from such a condition and had sought help repeatedly, but was not certified as such to receive the help.

Lindsay Clancy, a former labour and delivery nurse from Duxbury, Massachusetts, is currently on trial in Plymouth Superior Court for three counts of first-degree murder in the January 2023 strangulation deaths of her three children. Following the incident, Clancy attempted suicide by leaping from a second-story window, which left her paralysed from the waist down.

Key Case Facts

• The Incident: On January 24, 2023, while her husband was out running an errand, Clancy strangled each of her three children with exercise resistance bands in the basement before jumping out a window. She does not deny committing the acts, but has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.
• Mental Health Background: Before the incident, Clancy had sought extensive medical help for severe depression, anxiety, insomnia, and mental health struggles. She had checked herself into a psychiatric facility the week prior and had been prescribed multiple psychiatric medications.
• Defence Argument: The defence maintains she was suffering from acute postpartum psychosis. Expert witnesses for the defence, including forensic psychiatrist Dr Phillip Resnick, testified that Clancy was "clearly psychotic," felt as though an external force controlled her actions, and lacked the capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct.
• Prosecution Argument: State prosecutors contend the killings were planned. Rebuttal expert witnesses for the prosecution argued she suffered from mental illness, but insisted she was criminally responsible, retained an awareness of the illegality of her actions, and acted out of "altruistic filicide"—intending to take her own life and not wanting to leave her children behind.

As a practising Catholic, there are a host of questions this tragic incident raises; the principal question being how God would judge Lindsay Clancy.  We serve a God who delivers justice, who is slow to anger, and quick to forgive, who is the culmination of both justice and mercy in Christ Jesus. In Matthew 23:29-32, Jesus excoriates the teachers of the law and Pharisees, calling them hypocrites, passing judgment on them and making a prophetic statement about his own death at their hands:  ²⁹ “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. ³⁰ And you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ ³¹ So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets. ³² Go ahead, then, and complete what your ancestors started!”

What would Jesus say about Lindsay Clancy and her action of strangling her children to death with exercise resistance bands? Would she be forgiven in the Court of God’s Justice and Mercy? 

Jesus forgave prostitutes who surrendered their bodies to the depravity of men, and tax collectors who exploited to their advantage the circumstances of their fellowmen. We can be blasé about it, saying someone had to do it.

Lindsay Clancy sought help with her psychosis, but she did not receive help. Women with postpartum psychosis are a difficult-to-understand condition among family members of the affected who are focused on the child being fed, cleaned up, and put to sleep, whatever the hour, rather than the health of the mother.

Evolved men help care for the newborn baby, intrinsically understanding that their partner cannot handle it on their own. The most helpful person is the child’s grandmother. She can truly empathise, having gone through the process herself, facing pressure from all sides when, in the initial days, the mother appears to be failing the baby when not able to produce enough milk or the baby is not able to suckle sufficiently.

We don’t know whether Patrick Clancy, Lindsay’s husband, was such an ‘evolved’ person who understood what Lindsay was going through and provided the support needed, given there was barely a two-year difference between each of the three babies. Seems there was a gap in their understanding, or their relationship was on the rocks, with one partner wanting babies while the other, with every birth, was getting worse. A communication breakdown is a real possibility that did not allow sharing of deep feelings of a woman-centric crisis.

Add to this argument, in a society that ‘scorns’ having babies, but is ok with pre-marital sex and abortion – the killing of the baby in the womb – Lindsay and Patrick chose to have babies, most unusual in itself. Remember Lindsay Clancy was a former Labour and Delivery nurse. She handled babies all the time, notwithstanding the punishing hours those working in gynaecology have to endure.  

She was a good Catholic. Living in a society that was not Catholic. Given her condition, she did not choose to abandon her children and run away. She chose to kill herself by jumping off the balcony – as most people who are mentally challenged do. Lindsay would have agonised over what would happen to the babies when she was gone and chose to do the unpardonable, at least in the eyes of the righteous who believe they can tell right from wrong when they have never been in that situation. Never been a prostitute to know what it feels like to be one.

God knows. He created men and women. He provided for them as the Word of God says. He also gave them free will, which our first parents misused. The consequences continue to this day. Lindsay Clancy is fallen in the eyes of some, and to some she, now paralysed from waist down, is an unfortunate victim of her circumstances.

The court of law will rule, and the punishment will be for this lifetime. Finally, God will rule. And the reprieve or punishment will be for eternity.

-        Mathew Anthony