The Lindsay Clancy case has exposed something I find deeply disturbing about the way people talk about women, mental illness, and responsibility. Three children were strangled to death by their mother, and somehow a significant number of women have managed to make her the emotional center of the story. My position on insanity is pretty simple. I do not think insanity fundamentally changes the public safety question. If you are capable of murdering three children because you are psychotic, you are dangerous. If you are capable of murdering three children while completely sane, you are dangerous. The mechanism may be different. The social consequence should not be. Mental illness can explain behavior. It does not erase the behavior, resurrect the victims, or eliminate the danger that person has demonstrated. Explanation is not exoneration. For clarity, I am not in favor of the death penalty for anyone. That is a separate moral philosophy of mine. But I absolutely believe that people who demonstrate that they are profoundly unsafe for a functioning society should be removed from it. And this was not simply someone impulsively snapping. There was organization and forethought surrounding what happened. Methodical, sustained planning is not a hallmark of an acute psychotic break. Planning alone does not rule out psychosis, but organized behavior, concealment, forethought, and apparent awareness of consequences are all highly relevant when evaluating the claim that someone had completely lost contact with reality. Lindsay displayed all of these. You do not get to wave all of that away by saying “postpartum.” And the hormone argument is even worse. Hormones can influence mood, arousal, anxiety, aggression, sexual motivation, and cognition, often through the lens of preexisting beliefs. But influence is not compulsion. Hormones do not mechanically force people to murder. If you genuinely believe they do, apply that logic consistently. A man with high testosterone has biological influences affecting sexual motivation, dominance, and aggression. If he rapes or assaults someone, are you going to say his hormones made him do it? Of course you fucking aren’t. And you shouldn’t. Because biological influence does not eliminate agency. You cannot demand that women be treated as fully autonomous adults while simultaneously resurrecting the oldest argument imaginable about female biology making us irrational and incapable of controlling ourselves whenever accountability becomes uncomfortable. And stop conflating postpartum depression with postpartum psychosis. They are not the same thing. Women experience postpartum depression every day without murdering their children. Using a woman who strangled all three of hers as some kind of martyr for ordinary women struggling postpartum is not compassionate advocacy. It is unbelievably poorly thought out. If anything, you are giving vulnerable women another reason not to seek help. Imagine being scared to admit you are depressed, anxious, having intrusive thoughts, or struggling after birth because social media has rhetorically bundled ordinary postpartum mental health problems together with women murdering their babies. Brilliant advocacy🤡 What disturbs me most is how quickly people can look at three dead children and start constructing a rationale for the adult who killed them. If that is your immediate moral instinct, something is seriously wrong with your priorities and mindset. Seek help yourself. Now. You can advocate for better maternal mental health care. Please do. But that does not require turning the person who brutally killed three children into a martyr. Whether someone is criminally malicious or catastrophically insane, if they have demonstrated that they are profoundly unsafe for other human beings, society has every right to protect itself from them. And let’s remember, the children should be the center of this story. Not the woman who killed them.