Lindsey Clancy is Not the Problem; Women Are (We Did Not Want to Make this Episode)

This episode examines the Lindsay Clancy case in detail, including why it does not align with postpartum psychosis based on clinical insights from a trauma nurse. It explores historical and cross-cultural patterns of infanticide, legal responses in various societies, and the role of cultural and religious frameworks in shaping attitudes toward child protection. The discussion also covers the mother-baby dyad concept in modern medicine and its potential influence on perceptions of maternal responsibility.

Listeners will gain a deeper understanding of anthropological data on neonaticide and infanticide rates, comparisons across hunter-gatherer groups and historical societies, and proposals for building stronger cultural safeguards. The conversation emphasizes evidence-based analysis while addressing broader societal implications for preventing such tragedies.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins:. Hello, Simone. I know this is gonna be a hard episode to you for you. as our watchers know, we have avoided talking about the topic of the Lindsay child I can’t handle it. Because it emotionally affects my wife so much.

Simone Collins:I can’t log on the Internet. I just want all the kids to be okay.

Malcolm Collins:I recently wanted to go into two parts of this in detail that I haven’t seen other people talk about a lot. And they were brought up by a fan outreach to us because I originally was of the opinion, and I know this is going to piss off our fans, that I thought that it was plausible, perhaps even very likely

Simone Collins:That Lindsay Clancy had postpartum psychosis.

Malcolm Collins:however, I received new, breakdown of the what it’s like when a woman is in that from one of our fans who is a nurse and works regularly with women in postpartum psychosis that convinced me that this was not a case of postpartum psychosis. The second thing that I wanted to explore is why do women kill their babies at such high rates? And this is something that I was unaware of both in terms of our culture and in terms of other cultures. If you look over the course of a child’s entire lifetime, the rates are about equal for husband and and wives. But if you look at infancy, the rates are overwhelming for wives.

Simone Collins:Well, that’s because they’re overwhelmingly around the women and not the dads.

Malcolm Collins:Well, it’s also true if you look at cross cultural infanticide. So, there’s

Simone Collins:Why does that change? The women have the boobs. The there’s been some

Malcolm Collins:studies on this. If you look at, bird cell, estimated systematic infanticide in hunter forager groups, it was at between 1550% depending on the groups.

Simone Collins:Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah.

Malcolm Collins:The rate sits around 41%. If we look at the Aceh in Paraguay, the homicide rate and this is before the age of 10, so they they kill much later, which is unusual, is between ten and fourteen percent. If we look at the and this is one of these things when people talk about, like, uncontacted groups, and we need to preserve their lifestyle.

Simone Collins:Not. No. I’m I’m like, man.

Malcolm Collins:No. Eraticate their lifestyle. What are you talking about?

Simone Collins:It out. End it.

Malcolm Collins:This reminds me of this African story that I had to read in school about, like, how colonialism was so bad. And in it, they talk about leaving one twin always to die in the woods, and and they talk about this is, like, this horrible thing that, like, colonizers were ending this practice. And I was like, what are you talking? Colonize out of these people. Yes. Bend them over a log and colonize this. Because, clearly, they aren’t handling things on their own. Okay?

Speaker 4:It’s the book Things Fall Apart where this is described, which was assigned reading in my school because they thought it made the Christians look bad.

Malcolm Collins:Mhmm. If we look at the Inuit people, this was a a Ramessen 1931. Of the ‘96 births recalled by parents, thirty eight girls were killed. That is forty percent of them. If we look at Australian aboriginal groups in the nineteenth century, this is Kelsaw Yongenden, they put rates at between fifteen and thirty percent. And so I wanna understand why this happens. Why do you get these incredibly high rates of mothers killing their offspring? What does the science say? What do other sources say? And I also sat

Simone Collins:with Wait. Wait. Wait. So what you’re saying basically is, like, without strong cultural or statutory or both guardrails, women just be killing their babies?

Malcolm Collins:In fact, it is so common, and the nurse goes over this, which we’ll get to later in this piece.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Shout out to you, by the way. We, like, really love and respect you, so thanks for running in. In many countries You’re the only reason why we’re doing this, and it’s your fault that I’m not gonna sleep tonight, but I love you anyway.

Malcolm Collins:In many countries outside The United States, it is it is until fairly recently in legal history, it was legal for moms to kill their their kids.

Simone Collins:Well, I mean, she pointed out that even in was it Brazil? Like, the maximum sentence is three years

Speaker 6:So I decided to look up the case of Brazil, and it’s not that the maximum sentence is three years. It’s just that that’s around what mothers often get. For some recent cases, there was the Bella Horizonte case where the baby was left in a dumpster, and this she only got two years and nine months for. Then there was the Baluma case where a baby was stabbed with scissors, and she only got two years, two months, and twenty days.

Malcolm Collins:or some other It was Brazil and Japan and China.

Simone Collins:Very licenses. You did it, and you admitted you did it. Now please serve your three years in jail for kill. And this is, like, one of the worst crimes I could imagine. No. You don’t get three months. This is an innocent child. Like, it’s one thing if, like, oh, you you killed an adult. Like, they had a good run. Okay? But, like, a child, an infant, this

Malcolm Collins:is Well, I mean, Simone, you gotta keep in mind, you talk about other cultures is doing this. As it’s, like, horrifying thing when we know this was common and normalized in ancient Rome until they became Christian.

Simone Collins:Always thought until today that this was, like, men or even, like, external people to the family resting sick, nonviable babies from, you know, screaming mothers who were too weak in their postpartum state to fight back.

Malcolm Collins:No. It’s almost always the mothers. And in fact, it’s even almost always the mothers. So I was reading cross cultural analysis.

Simone Collins:The most cruel and sick thing in the world. Like, the a baby the the only safe place you have is a kid. Like, that’s supposed to be the final safe refuge. I know you killed by that.

Malcolm Collins:So what’s important to note is, when mothers do it, because the, Lindsey Clancy case actually does not match the anthropological record. K. The anthropological record, the normal time to do this is before you start nursing the baby. With the the hormonal chemicals that create the bonding to the infant, that process happens with weaning, and that makes it much harder for the mother t