The Lindsay Clancy Case: Looked at from Canada - What a Child-Rights Lens Requires Us to See

Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich

The notorious case of Lindsay Clancy forces us to contemplate something almost unbearable: a mother can love her children and still become the person from whom they most urgently need protection.

Clancy is presently on trial in Massachusetts for the January 2023 deaths of her three children: Cora, Dawson and Callan. Notwithstanding online conspiracy theories pointing the finger at the children’s father, Patrick Clancy, who acted in surprising ways after the deaths, Lindsay has admitted causing their deaths. However, her defence counsel, Kevin Reddington maintains that she was experiencing postpartum psychosis and was not criminally responsible. The prosecution disputes that account. As of August 24, 2026, the trial remains underway and no final determination has been made about her mental state or criminal responsibility.[1]

Public discussion has largely divided into three camps. One emphasizes the children and demands accountability. Another emphasizes the mother, concerning itself with Clancy’s mental illness and the systemic failure to help her. A third is fomenting conspiracy theories about the father framing her. A child-rights lens tells us that these discursive options present us with a false choice.

The children had rights. Their mother had rights. Those rights were deeply connected.

Children have an inherent right to life

Article 6 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) provides that every child has the inherent right to life and that governments must ensure, to the maximum extent possible, the child’s survival and development.[2]

That language matters.

Children are not possessions belonging to their parents.

They are individual human beings and rights-holders. 

The United States is not a signatory to the UNCRC, but virtually all other countries, including Canada, are.

Cora, Dawson and Callan therefore cannot become supporting characters in a story told only about their mother’s suffering. Their lives had independent value. Their terror, vulnerability and deaths must remain at the centre of the legal and social response.

But recognizing their right to life does not require us to deny the conditions that placed their lives in danger. The Convention also recognizes that parents require assistance to carry out their child-rearing responsibilities. Article 18 obliges governments to provide appropriate assistance to parents, while articles 24 and 27 protect children’s rights to health, development and an adequate standard of living.[3]

Protecting mothers is therefore not a diversion from protecting children. It is one of the principal ways in which we protect them.

The Canadian law of infanticide

The legal analysis would be different if this case had occurred in Canada.

Section 233 of the Criminal Code sets forth the longstanding offence of infanticide. It applies when a woman causes the death of her “newly-born child” while her mind is disturbed because she has not fully recovered from giving birth or because of the effects of lactation.[4] Infanticide carries a maximum sentence of five years, dramatically less than the mandatory life sentence applicable to murder.

The offence would not automatically apply to Clancy, and its application would be especially uncertain regarding her older children. Canadian law does not treat every killing by a mother as infanticide. The Crown must prove the statutory elements, including the required connection between childbirth or lactation and the mother’s disturbed mind.

Nevertheless, Canadian law expressly recognizes something that public discourse often resists: and which our laws acknowledged hundreds of years before modern mental health was a discipline: mothers are vulnerable. Childbirth can disturb the mind, and maternal mental illness can profoundly affect criminal responsibility. The Supreme Court of Canada has interpreted “mind is then disturbed” as a legal standard less demanding than establishing a mental disorder defence. The disturbance must be causally connected to childbirth or lactation, but it need not amount to a defined psychiatric diagnosis.[5]

The existence of section 233 does not mean that a child’s life matters less. It means that culpability cannot be assessed honestly without examining vulnerability, embodiment and context. A just legal system must be capable of holding two truths simultaneously: the children’s deaths were an immense wrong, and a profoundly ill mother may not bear the same moral responsibility as a person acting with an unimpaired mind.

Infanticide is thinkable

We prefer to describe maternal infanticide as monstrous and incomprehensible. That protects us from recognizing that it is also humanly possible. The reason that hundreds of women have gathered outside the Plymouth Massachusetts courthouse where the trial is taking place is that mothers know from experience how vulnerable the postpartum period is as a time for children and for their mothers.

Maternal aggression, neglect and infanticide occur in other mammalian species, sometimes in conditions involving stress, danger or scarce resources. That biological fact does not determine human behaviour and must never be used to excuse it. It does, however, challenge the sentimental fiction that maternity invariably overrides every other bodily and psychological force.

Even as it is horrifying, infanticide is very much thinkable. Mothers and children are vulnerable and need support. Our laws prove it. Our history proves it. Cases such as Clancy’s prove it.

The frightening truth is not that Lindsay Clancy was utterly unlike other mothers. It is that she was not. She was a mother subjected to forces that exist along recognizable continuums: exhaustion, anxiety, isolation, impossible expectations, bodily upheaval, responsibility without respite, and fear that she was failing the people she loved most.

Most mothers experiencing these pressures will never harm their children. Postpartum mental illness does not make women inherently dangerous, and stigma may prevent people from seeking help. But rare catastrophic outcomes cannot be prevented by pretending they are unimaginable.

Motherhood is hard—and fatherhood should be hard too

Motherhood is hard. If it is being done properly, fatherhood is hard too.

Our culture continues to celebrate fathers for “helping” while treating mothers as the default managers of children’s bodies, emotions, appointments, meals, development and safety. We then demand that women erase the evidence of childbirth, recover a “bikini body,” resume paid work, sustain a relationship, maintain a beautiful home and somehow “have it all.”

These aspirations are not empowering when they conceal the care labour required to keep children alive. They are toxic.

Clinically, the postnatal period is often defined much more narrowly than three to five years. But the physical, psychological, relational and economic consequences of pregnancy and early caregiving can plainly persist for years. We should think of the first three to five years of a child’s life as an extended period of family vulnerability—not because every mother remains medically “postpartum” for that long, but because intensive dependency, disrupted sleep and relentless care do not end at the six-week check-up.

Too much stress in mothers becomes too much stress in children. Their interests are not oppositional; they are intertwined.

Children are a collective responsibility

Law and society deal poorly with vulnerability and connectedness. Law prefers separate individuals, identifiable choices and linear causation.

Parenting is none of those things. Mothers and children live in physical, emotional and social interdependence.

Yet, in Canada as in the USA, contemporary parenting often occurs in a hypermobile and profoundly isolated society. Extended families live far apart. Neighbours may be strangers. Paid work is inflexible. Childcare is too often scarce. Mental-health care is fragmented. A distressed mother may be surrounded by professionals without being genuinely held by a community.

A child-rights response would acknowledge within the criminal process the vulnerability of mothers to postpartum mental health concerns. A child rights lens would therefore extend beyond prosecuting a parent after children are dead. The rights of the child require accessible perinatal mental-health care, sustained screening, affordable childcare, paid leave, respite services, home visiting, practical support and meaningful paternal responsibility. Child rights require communities in which someone notices when a family is disintegrating—and has somewhere effective to turn.

Children must be understood as a collective responsibility, not parental property, not social media accessories, and not a private lifestyle project.

Children's rights place positive obligations upon all of us.

A Child Rights lens on the Clancy case reveals that we need not choose between compassion for a mother and justice for her children. We too often fail to understand how completely the safety of children is connected to the safety of mothers. When we fail mothers, we fail children.

When we support mothers—seriously, materially, and as a community—we act directly in defence of children’s rights.

[1] “Lindsay Clancy Murder Trial Closing Arguments Expected Next Week”, CBS News Boston (21 August 2026), online: CBS News.

[2] Convention on the Rights of the Child, 20 November 1989, 1577 UNTS 3, art 6 (entered into force 2 September 1990), online: United Nations Human Rights Office.

[3] Ibid, arts 18, 24, 27.

[4] Criminal Code, RSC 1985, c C-46, s 233, online: Justice Laws Website.

[5] R v Borowiec, 2016 SCC 11 at paras 15–35, [2016] 1 SCR 80, online: Supreme Court of Canada. See also R v LB, 2011 ONCA 153, 274 OAC 365.