Massachusetts mother Lindsay Clancy’s trial — which ended in a deadlocked jury over the deaths of her three children while she was reportedly in the grip of severe postpartum depression — drew an outpouring of sympathy from women, sociologist Rosemary Hopcroft writes in Aporia Magazine. Hundreds gathered outside the courthouse in support, and social media filled with women sharing their own struggles with the overwhelming demands of new motherhood.
Hopcroft, who studies the sociology of gender and evolution, argues the reaction reflects something deeper than the specifics of one tragic case: an evolutionary mismatch between how maternal psychology evolved and how mothers actually live today.
Her research with Dana Bradley, spanning 29 countries, found the sex gap in reported depression is wider — not narrower — in developed, gender-egalitarian societies than in less egalitarian ones. In a separate study with Julie McLaughlin, she found that having more children lowered women’s depression risk in less gender-equal societies but raised it in gender-egalitarian ones — a pattern not seen among men.
Hopcroft traces the difference to how mothers are supported. Drawing on primatologist Sarah Hrdy’s research on cooperative childrearing, she notes ancestral mothers were rarely isolated with an infant, but embedded in kin networks that shared caregiving. Today, by contrast, roughly 68% of U.S. mothers with children under six work outside the home, often with little nearby family help and workplaces not built around parenting.
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“That recognition does not excuse or minimize Clancy’s actions,” Hopcroft writes. “Rather, it helps explain why many women identify with her.” She argues rebuilding extended-family and community support, alongside more family-friendly workplaces, could ease the psychological toll of modern motherhood — and might even help address declining fertility rates.
