John Tlumacki
John Tlumacki
The Burden of Freedom: The Lindsay Clancy Mistrial Is Not an Indictment on Women’s Rights
The Burden of Freedom: The Lindsay Clancy Mistrial Is Not an Indictment on Women’s Rights
On Jan. 24, 2024, Lindsay Clancy fatally strangled her three children in the basement of their home with exercise bands. Lindsay and her legal defense team argue that the murder was the end result of months of heavy and at times overlapping doses of psychiatric medicine and care for Clancy’s postpartum depression, anxiety and psychosis. The prosecution is arguing this murder was an intentional and deliberate choice.
As the Lindsay Clancy case grips the nation, a concerning rise in misogyny cloaked in medical jargon has emerged online along with it.
This misogyny is now pioneering a new rhetoric: repealing the 19th Amendment.
While the murder of the Clancy children at the hands of Lindsay is deeply concerning, one criminal case has no correlation to and therefore, should have no bearing on whether women across the country retain their constitutional right to vote.
The assumption that a woman’s hormones disqualify her from voting is not only misinformation about how hormones work, but also discredits the genuine challenges faced by postpartum women.
The simplified argument that “hormones made Lindsay Clancy kill her children” being peddled online does not take into account the extensively documented complexities of Clancy’s mental health and the psychiatric care she received.
According to the Guardian, “In the three months before the killings, clinicians prescribed a range of antidepressants, sleep aids, an antipsychotic and other medications.”
This range of prescriptions led Clancy to report feeling profound insomnia, anxiety, despair and delusions about reality. Based on court records and testimony given during the trial by Clancy’s healthcare providers, she was actively being prescribed 12 to 13 different medications, but had 32 total prescriptions written and filled from multiple providers in a four-month time span.
The overly medicated state of Clancy was used as a support for the defense’s insanity defense.
While many online, on both sides of the “repeal the 19th” movement, acknowledge the medical system’s failures in the Clancy case, they diverge in their responses.
The “repeal the 19th” movement argues that criminal incidents like the murder of the Clancy children are more likely to happen to women because of their hormones. Therefore, women as a monolith are too volatile to vote.
In contrast, the opposing side to the “repeal the 19th” movement argues that the healthcare system failed Lindsay by refusing to take her mental health seriously. They argue that cases like Clancy’s are rare, worse-case scenarios that should have no bearing on voting rights for women across the country.
The rhetoric of this group extends beyond the trial itself and begs the question: when did one woman’s medical state become the foundation for the elimination of all women’s rights?
This argumentation is particularly harmful because it can be used to invalidate the franchise rights of any group in America that has faced mental health challenges, real or imagined.
Historically, this rhetoric has been used by the likes of former Vice President John C. Calhoun to justify the disenfranchisement of Black voters in the 19th century. Calhoun made his arguments by citing dubious and at times overtly racist census data on Black mental health.
He stated, “Here [the U.S. census] is proof of the necessity of slavery. The African is incapable of self-care and sinks into lunacy under the burden of freedom.”
Calhoun’s sentiments echo the “repeal the 19th” movement’s intentional misuse and misinterpretation of medical information from the trial.
The misogynistic argument that “the burden of freedom” causes mental health struggles that incapacitate a woman’s ability to rationally participate in democracy is an extrapolation to an extreme degree.
According to this logic, men, who statistically accounted for 80% of all suicide deaths in 2023 according to the CDC, could just as easily be labeled as mentally unstable and not invested enough in the longevity of the nation to contribute through voting.
The burden of freedom should not fall on one sex because of the actions of one mentally ill woman. Rather, the burden of freedom is one that all citizens share the responsibility for protecting and defending at all costs.
The “repeal the 19th” movement is dangerous because it ignores the genuine flaws in the maternal mental health field and because it provides a theoretical framework that erodes the rights of all Americans based on the alleged actions of an individual.
The mistrial in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy is not an indictment of the 19th Amendment but a test of how Americans will respond to attacks on the franchise rights of fellow citizens in the 21st century.
On Jan. 24, 2024, Lindsay Clancy fatally strangled her three children in the basement of their home with exercise bands. Lindsay and her legal defense team argue that the murder was the end result of months of heavy and at times overlapping doses of psychiatric medicine and care for Clancy’s postpartum depression, anxiety and psychosis. The prosecution is arguing this murder was an intentional and deliberate choice.
As the Lindsay Clancy case grips the nation, a concerning rise in misogyny cloaked in medical jargon has emerged online along with it.
This misogyny is now pioneering a new rhetoric: repealing the 19th Amendment.
While the murder of the Clancy children at the hands of Lindsay is deeply concerning, one criminal case has no correlation to and therefore, should have no bearing on whether women across the country retain their constitutional right to vote.
The assumption that a woman’s hormones disqualify her from voting is not only misinformation about how hormones work, but also discredits the genuine challenges faced by postpartum women.
The simplified argument that “hormones made Lindsay Clancy kill her children” being peddled online does not take into account the extensively documented complexities of Clancy’s mental health and the psychiatric care she received.
According to the Guardian, “In the three months before the killings, clinicians prescribed a range of antidepressants, sleep aids, an antipsychotic and other medications.”
This range of prescriptions led Clancy to report feeling profound insomnia, anxiety, despair and delusions about reality. Based on court records and testimony given during the trial by Clancy’s healthcare providers, she was actively being prescribed 12 to 13 different medications, but had 32 total prescriptions written and filled from multiple providers in a four-month time span.
The overly medicated state of Clancy was used as a support for the defense’s insanity defense.
While many online, on both sides of the “repeal the 19th” movement, acknowledge the medical system’s failures in the Clancy case, they diverge in their responses.
The “repeal the 19th” movement argues that criminal incidents like the murder of the Clancy children are more likely to happen to women because of their hormones. Therefore, women as a monolith are too volatile to vote.
In contrast, the opposing side to the “repeal the 19th” movement argues that the healthcare system failed Lindsay by refusing to take her mental health seriously. They argue that cases like Clancy’s are rare, worse-case scenarios that should have no bearing on voting rights for women across the country.
The rhetoric of this group extends beyond the trial itself and begs the question: when did one woman’s medical state become the foundation for the elimination of all women’s rights?
This argumentation is particularly harmful because it can be used to invalidate the franchise rights of any group in America that has faced mental health challenges, real or imagined.
Historically, this rhetoric has been used by the likes of former Vice President John C. Calhoun to justify the disenfranchisement of Black voters in the 19th century. Calhoun made his arguments by citing dubious and at times overtly racist census data on Black mental health.
He stated, “Here [the U.S. census] is proof of the necessity of slavery. The African is incapable of self-care and sinks into lunacy under the burden of freedom.”
Calhoun’s sentiments echo the “repeal the 19th” movement’s intentional misuse and misinterpretation of medical information from the trial.
The misogynistic argument that “the burden of freedom” causes mental health struggles that incapacitate a woman’s ability to rationally participate in democracy is an extrapolation to an extreme degree.
According to this logic, men, who statistically accounted for 80% of all suicide deaths in 2023 according to the CDC, could just as easily be labeled as mentally unstable and not invested enough in the longevity of the nation to contribute through voting.
The burden of freedom should not fall on one sex because of the actions of one mentally ill woman. Rather, the burden of freedom is one that all citizens share the responsibility for protecting and defending at all costs.
The “repeal the 19th” movement is dangerous because it ignores the genuine flaws in the maternal mental health field and because it provides a theoretical framework that erodes the rights of all Americans based on the alleged actions of an individual.
The mistrial in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy is not an indictment of the 19th Amendment but a test of how Americans will respond to attacks on the franchise rights of fellow citizens in the 21st century.