On the evening of 24 January 2023, Patrick Clancy left his house in Duxbury, Massachusetts to collect food. His wife Lindsay was at home with their three children, Cora who was five years old, Dawson who was three, and Callan who was eight months. By the time Patrick came back, all three were dead. Lindsay had strangled them and had then tried to take her own life, and she survived with paralysis from the waist down. These are the apparent facts.
She was thirty-two and worked as a labour and delivery nurse, which is to say she had spent her career attending other women through childbirth. Callan had been born in May 2022. Over the months that followed her mind came apart in a way her family later described in court, and her prescriptions were changed again and again as she reported new symptoms and new side effects. Her trial ran for six weeks in 2026. She never denied killing the children. Her defence was that she was not criminally responsible for what she did, because she was in postpartum psychosis, a condition in which a woman loses contact with reality in the weeks or months after giving birth. The prosecution called more than seventy witnesses to argue that she knew exactly what she was doing. On 4 September 2026, after seven days of deliberation, the jury told the judge it could not agree, and he declared a mistrial.
Four days after his children were killed, Patrick Clancy published a statement asking people to forgive his wife. He said he already had.
Isaiah 49:15
“Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.”
The question is asked and answered inside one verse. Yea, they may forget. Most of us have only ever heard the first half, and the first half on its own is a warm sentiment about mothers. The second half is the reason the verse exists.
The prophet is arguing from the lesser thing to the greater. He takes probably the strongest bond available in human experience and sets it down as a floor, and then he says that God’s remembering runs below that floor. Deeper. For the argument to work at all, the floor has to be able to give way. If a mother’s love could never fail, Isaiah would be promising you that God loves you at roughly the level your mother does, and any of us could have written that. He is promising you something that holds after that level has gone. So he concedes the failure himself, in the text, before anyone gets the chance to raise it against him.
A woman may forget. Scripture said it first.
Racham
The Hebrew word for compassion in that verse is racham, and it is built on rechem, which means womb. The feeling and the organ share a root, because Hebrew treats this particular love as natural, bodily, and involuntary, the sort of thing you would expect to keep working the way breathing keeps working.
Isaiah admits that it can stop. He offers no explanation for why it stops. He draws no line between the mother who walks out and the mother whose mind has broken, and he shows no interest in helping us tell them apart. He simply states that it breaks because it can break and he moves on to his point.
Lamentations 4:10
“The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own children: they were their meat in the destruction of the daughter of my people.”
Jeremiah is, here, recording the siege of Jerusalem, and pitiful in that older English means full of pity. He calls the women compassionate in the same sentence in which he reports that they cooked their children, and he never takes the word back. The deed and the description are left standing next to each other. Our instinct is to make the person match the deed, and the text refuses to do it for us.
While the trial was running, some people gathered outside the courthouse wearing pink to say she was a victim, and a much larger number online called her a monster and asked why there was any need for a trial. Both camps reached total certainty from very little material.
I have written elsewhere about the Keyhole Perception Fallacy and I probably will do a full note on it soon. Looking through a keyhole gives you a real view of the room, and that is the issue with it. The view is genuine enough to feel complete, so you rule on the whole room from one angle. The angles you were never given never enter your reasoning at all. Twelve people sat through six weeks of testimony, medical records and expert evidence, and they could not agree among themselves. The clip you watched ran forty seconds. What makes for better living is an ability to arrest your own thoughts before making a conclusion.
The Bible’s Concept: Cities of refuge
“Then ye shall appoint you cities to be cities of refuge for you; that the slayer may flee thither, which killeth any person at unawares.” (Numbers 35:11)
“Whoso killeth his neighbour ignorantly, whom he hated not in time past.” (Deuteronomy 19:4)
The law kept that man alive and treated him as a different case from the murderer, because the same physical act carried different weight depending on what was in his mind while he did it. That grading is in the Torah, and it predates any living person’s knowledge of psychiatry. Christian theology later put a name to the principle. An act is charged to a person in full when they knew what they were doing and agreed to do it. Psychosis attacks both of those at once, which is the entire reason it is a legal question and a pastoral one.
The law is no different. It separates the act from the intention to do the act. So a person can have physically carried out an act but is charged with a lesser crime because the intention does not exist or could not be proven beyond reasonable doubt. Any good lawyer will here mention actus reus and mens rea.
Two things are true together here. Three children who carried the image of God were killed, and no illness turns that into anything other than what it is: a very evil incident. And the measure of guilt that belongs to Lindsay Clancy rests on the condition of her mind on one January evening. That condition is something out of our reach, no matter how much we can relate or understand.
“Therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts.” (1 Corinthians 4:5)
Her mind that evening is a hidden thing. Paul has told you what to do with those.
There is still nothing here to celebrate, and she cannot be turned into a mascot for anything. Making her a symbol of any ideology or position converts three dead children into material for a campaign. That is unjust and practically insane. Cora, Dawson, Callan are dead and quiet and cannot speak for themselves if they tried. Yet, as we cannot make Lindsay a hero or mascot, she cannot be removed from the human race either, because Christianity keeps no category for a person who is beyond mercy based on physical activities, no matter how grievous.
The church and a failing mind
We have almost no language in Nigeria for a woman whose mind is breaking after childbirth. The reflex is to make it spiritual, so she needs deliverance, or something is following the family, or she should pray harder and stop entertaining the thoughts. Ask any woman who has been through it what she was told. She learns quickly that the safest thing available to her is to perform maternal joy on schedule and keep quiet, and so she does that until she cannot.
Many of you reading this grew up inside that arrangement and watched the adults treat a collapsing mind as a discipline problem. I once saw a video of a popular Nigerian saying that anyone who claims they are depressed just needs a bank alert and the depression will disappear. Such a weird culture. Yet, it is a rampant culture. It is worth naming what that costs because the saner idea is a minority idea. People hide until hiding stops being possible, and then we hold a service and say nobody saw it coming.
Isaiah 49:15 gives you the standing to say plainly that a woman may forget, that the strongest natural love human beings have can fail, and that Scripture put this in writing itself. Look at what precedes it:
Isaiah 49:14
“But Zion said, The LORD hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me.”
Verse 15 is God’s reply to that sentence. The whole comparison is addressed to somebody who is convinced she has been abandoned, and the mother in the illustration is only the measuring stick. The promise belongs to the forgotten party.
“Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me.” (Isaiah 49:16)
We must be okay holding the balance. The mother’s love in this case, for whatever reason, failed. We can hold her accountable without discountenancing the issues that have created this disaster of a situation.
