Tina Cassidy ties the Lindsay Clancy case to postpartum psychosis and asks who supports new mothers after birth. Clancy, a Duxbury mother, wrote in her diary that she was “drowning,” a detail Cassidy uses to press for a closer look at postpartum care.
Tina Cassidy and Lindsay Clancy
Cassidy is the author of Birth: The Surprising History of How We Are Born. She writes that the Clancy case should force questions about care for new mothers, while jurors decide the fate of Lindsay Clancy.
Clancy is described as a Duxbury mother who allegedly murdered her three young children and tried to kill herself during a severe bout of postpartum psychosis. Cassidy uses that case to argue that the period after birth can be dangerous when a mother is isolated and left to manage recovery alone.
Birth customs in America
In many cultures, the postpartum period once came with rules that kept the mother resting. Mayan mothers would not resume their duties for 20 days, Japanese mothers stayed in their birth chamber for three weeks, and in many European countries mothers were not allowed to cook for 40 days after giving birth.
Cassidy says those customs were meant to let mothers rest and recuperate and to help others notice troubling physical or mental maladies. She also says the term “gossip” is said in the article to come from “Godsibbs,” or sisters in God.
The decline of those customs accelerated after World War II, when most developed countries moved birth from the home to the hospital. Cassidy links that shift to the isolation women experience after giving birth in America, where rugged individualism leaves many families without the kind of day-to-day support earlier cultures built in.
Paid help after delivery
The article says modern postpartum help exists, but often only if families can pay for it. Cassidy points to a night nurse, a nanny, a lactation consultant, and a subscription app to track sleeping and feeding as examples of paid services now used in the postpartum period.
That market is already described as nearly $17 billion and is expected to reach more than $27 billion in the next five years. The gap is straightforward: help exists, but women who need it often have to buy it.
That pressure is sharper after a cesarean section, which requires at least six weeks of recovery, and in a workforce where about half are women. Many mothers are healing while also preparing to return to work, and lack of paid parental leave can force a quick return before recovery and sleep have settled.
Cassidy also ties the risk to biology. She writes that nature’s cocktail of oxytocin, progesterone, and endorphins is supposed to help a mom love, nurture, and breastfeed her newborn, but progesterone and estrogen plummet to levels not experienced before conception about a day after delivery. That change can cause weepiness, irritability, and mood swings for at least a couple of weeks postpartum, and 10 to 20 percent of the time it can develop into postpartum psychosis.
For readers, the practical question is the one Cassidy leaves hanging: what specific support reforms, if any, could prevent postpartum isolation and severe mental health crises? The case now sits not just as a criminal proceeding, but as a prompt to think about who shows up for new mothers when the hospital stay ends.
