Nancy Mace didn’t mince her words. “If postpartum mental illness becomes a get-out-of-jail-free card for murdering your children, then anyone diagnosed with it should lose custody of their children”, wrote the 48-year-old Republican congresswoman on her social media on September 2.
The statement came just as the jury in the case against Lindsay Clancy, the 36-year-old former nurse accused of killing her three children—Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, just 8 months old—became deadlocked in Massachusetts, forcing a mistrial.
Clancy never denied what she did that night in January 2023 in Duxbury. Her defense argues postpartum psychosis and overmedication; the prosecution insists she knew exactly what she was doing.
What Mace did not say is that a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity does not mean freedom: it entails indefinite psychiatric hospitalization and constant evaluations. Even so, her comment opened an uncomfortable rift: can mental health in motherhood be discussed without erasing responsibility for three lives lost? Is Nancy Mace right?
