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.