On Sunday, Fox News reported, “Calls to repeal women’s rights to vote are emerging from the online firestorm over the Lindsay Clancy trial, prompting Republican women to warn that the intraparty rhetoric could hurt the GOP.”
The fact that this article was published by Fox News was itself noteworthy. Press Baron Rupert Murdoch is one of the few remaining centers of power on the right who is strong enough to pick fights with Trump and his MAGA supporters. In recent years, Murdoch’s outlets have carved out a position for themselves as gatekeepers who work to protect the GOP brand from the most self-destructive impulses of MAGA. One recent example of this phenomenon is the decision to fire (or at least take off the air) the firebrand election denier Maria Bartiromo.
The Fox article was also significant for highlighting how the tragic case of Lindsay Clancy is being exploited by the hard right to justify misogyny. Clancy killed three of her children in 2023. Her legal defense was that she suffered from postpartum psychosis and bipolar disorder. Eleven jurors voted to acquit Clancy based on this argument, but one juror resisted, leading to a mistrial.
Nine of the jurors who voted to acquit—presumably because they thought Clancy deserved pity rather than harsh punishment—were women; the lone holdout was a man. The hard right has seized on these facts to justify arguments that women are incapable of reason. The Fox article quoted a post on X that made a common argument: “The female jurors in the Lindsay Clancy trial are speaking out about their deliberations and disagreements with the sole male holdout. The more they speak the better they make the case for repealing the 19th Amendment.”
Besides the psychosis can you explain to me what else they might be empathizing with?
Maybe I’m missing knowledge about the case somewhere but I have tried to go over the various points of the case that I’m aware of in order to give her some validation and I’ve really struggled.
Edit
I appreciate your time and what you have shared. I decided to spend more time googling the case and looking up the details.
I don’t disagree with anything you’ve shared at all.
That said, some of the more extreme viral content of people showing solidarity with her has been people making content showing them pretend to hurt their children.
We are both well aware that conservatives are always scheming about ways in which to remove the rights of others. So yes, I do think there is merit to the idea that this was astroturfed someway in order to provide them with a casus belli.
There’s a lot of concerns about the investigation. The police arrive to 3 dead children and a woman with catastrophic injuries and the husband saying she did it. The husband’s phone or phone records weren’t seized, as far as I can work out his clothing wasnt seized, her apple watch wasnt seized, blood on the bedroom door knob wasn’t swabbed, there’s a roughly 15 minute gap in the timeline where he’s not accounted for, and multiple other things. His phone should have been seized cos apart from anything else, the cops may not have been able to get into hers.
The children deserved a high quality investigation and didn’t get it. A lot of people have understandable concerns about the evidence.
This I didn’t know. The children deserve it but she does too.
I haven’t really seen any of this in the news at all when it comes to this topic, thanks for sharing.
Women’s healthcare has been neglected for a long time. Health studies routinely treat women as smaller men. That includes during pregnancy and postpartum care. There are many, many women who have struggled with postpartum depression, and some psychosis, and did not receive any help from their doctors, husbands, families, etc.
The maternal mortality rate in the US is the highest of any developed nation.
So there are thousands to millions of women who desperately needed help, who were drowning while having to care for a newborn and possibly other children, with very little to no help at all. They were forced to tough it out. Sometimes being forced to tough out getting scant hours of sleep each night and healing from birth and dealing with postpartum depression leads to mental breaks and psychosis.
Many mothers can empathize with that feeling of being abandoned and having to put everything ahead of taking care of themselves to their own detriment. We’re often told to lose weight, we’re hysteric, we just need to take a break, whatever when we seek help for women’s health issues. Women are often not taken seriously when we report symptoms.
Have you read the Lemon Clot story? It is focused on having to entertain guests during the postpartum period, but it’s an eye-opening look at some of the physical ailments women deal with immediately after birth:
Well, none of this was anything new to me. I have read Lemon Clot as well.
Again, I’m very sympathetic towards this and a lot of this does apply to Clancy, but she’s also in a different class than most women. She had access to a lot more than the average woman did, hence why I struggle to understand the surge of sympathy towards her in particular.
This is why I mentioned my possible lack of knowledge on the case.
Even with her access to more than the average woman, she didn’t receive adequate care. It’s actually because she’s an affluent white woman that we’re even talking about this case and the overwhelming issues with women’s healthcare that helped lead to this tragedy.
You can believe that Clancy deserves prison. But to use this case to argue that women and mothers don’t need a better system or better help when they are struggling is my main issue with most conversations surrounding this. Or worse, to argue that women are too emotional and too beholden to our hormones to make rational decisions or to be trusted with our own children.
This woman asked for help and her family and doctors didn’t do enough. That’s my personal opinion. And having been a woman who was abandoned by her husband and family during a postpartum period, I can empathize with Clancy and what it took to push her to the point of psychosis.
Postpartum can be an incredibly dark and scary time for women. I would never wish what I went through on my worst enemy.
Conservatives will use whatever excuse is available to try to strip women of their rights. I think it’s lazy to shrug this issue off as just another way for conservatives to exert control even if there’s some truth to it. Because when you assert that the reason so many people are invested in this is because of bad actors, you’re ignoring the very real women and allies that are shouting from the roof tops about the issues with women’s healthcare.
Why not wrangle this topic to push the conversation about improving health outcomes for women instead of telling others to be quiet because conservatives might use our concerns to subjugate us?
I have never said this and I would appreciate it if you didn’t put words into my mouth. My statement was in regards towards how people have chosen to act in solidarity towards Clancy.
Obviously a lot of these acts have been used against you but more importantly they haven’t done anything to shine a light on these issues either. Posting videos on socials pretending to abuse your children in support of her doesn’t shine a light on these issues or even show that they exist.
There’s a reason I edited my post and left it at that. I’m not really sure you get what I’m saying and it’s fine. I support the cause and I appreciate the heightened awareness you’ve given myself and anyone else that reads the comment chain on the issues.