Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey wants the state to send nurses to the homes of all 68,000 families welcoming newborns each year, a proposal tied directly to the Lindsay Clancy murder trial that ended in a deadlocked jury.
Healey announced the plan at a Tuesday news conference, calling for $2 million to expand a federally funded home-visit program that currently reaches only about 3,000 Massachusetts families annually. The proposal would mark the state's first direct investment in the program and make voluntary nurse visits available to every household with a newborn. A separate $250,000 would go to the Massachusetts Child Psychiatry Access Program for Moms, funding statewide tracking of postpartum psychosis data, a clinical education team for mental health providers, and expanded outreach to families about early warning signs.
Healey also directed the Massachusetts Department of Public Health to broaden screening for perinatal mood and anxiety disorders, an effort she framed as helping providers catch problems earlier and connect families with care before a crisis.
The governor did not try to separate the policy from the case that prompted it. Lindsay Clancy, a 36-year-old former labor and delivery nurse, admitted to fatally strangling her three children, five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson, and eight-month-old Callan, with exercise bands at the family's home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, on January 24, 2023. Her defense argued she was not guilty by reason of insanity, contending that she had been overmedicated while suffering from postpartum depression and that the drug cocktail triggered psychosis.
Eleven of twelve jurors found the insanity argument compelling. A single holdout refused to acquit. Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial.
Healey acknowledged that postpartum challenges are, in her words, "nothing new," but said the Clancy trial sparked "a renewed discussion and focus on that." As the Daily Mail reported, the governor told reporters:
"That case and that trial has certainly continued the conversation and raised the conversation nationally, internationally, to a new level."
She added at the conference, as the New York Post reported: "To every mom who has struggled with her mental health before, during or after pregnancy, I want you to know we see you, I see you."
The scale of the problem inside Massachusetts undercuts any suggestion that the current system is working. Mental illness, including substance use disorder, was the leading underlying cause of death for pregnant and postpartum women in the state from 2019 to 2024, AP News reported, accounting for 38 percent of those deaths. Eighty-five percent of maternal deaths in Massachusetts during that period were deemed preventable, with more than half occurring between seven days and one year after giving birth.
Nationally, about one in eight women develops postpartum depression, and roughly the same proportion experiences postpartum anxiety, per a 2024 BMC Public Health study cited in the reporting. Postpartum psychosis, the condition at the center of the Clancy defense, is far rarer, striking one to two out of every 1,000 birth mothers. But the consequences at the extreme end are severe: Cleveland Clinic estimates that roughly four percent of women with the most severe form of postpartum psychosis kill their children, and about five percent take their own lives.
Those numbers frame the gap between the existing program's reach and the governor's ambition. Roughly 3,000 families a year receive nurse visits now. Healey wants to cover all 68,000. The visits are voluntary. Nurses monitor mothers' postpartum health and screen for depression and other mental health concerns.
For all the urgency in Healey's language, the proposal remains just that, a proposal. The reporting does not specify whether the $2 million and $250,000 have been formally introduced as legislation, filed as a budget request, or issued through executive action. No legislative co-sponsors were named. No timeline for implementation was offered. And the current legal status of Lindsay Clancy following the mistrial, whether prosecutors plan a retrial, went unaddressed at the news conference.
Healey's administration pointed to prior actions as evidence of commitment: expanding MassHealth postpartum coverage to 12 months, broadening access to doula services, and strengthening postpartum mental health screening requirements. Those steps predated the Clancy trial.
Breitbart noted that the combined proposals total $2.25 million in requested funding, a modest figure against the backdrop of a state budget measured in tens of billions, and against the governor's own framing of maternal mental health as a life-and-death crisis.
Nobody disputes that postpartum depression and psychosis are real, or that families deserve better screening. The three children at the center of the Clancy case, Cora, Dawson, and Callan, are dead. Eleven jurors concluded that their mother's mental state was so compromised she could not be held criminally responsible. That is a tragedy no press conference can undo.
But the pattern here is worth watching. A horrific crime captures national attention. A governor steps to a podium, proposes a modest spending package, and frames it as systemic reform. The hard questions, how the existing system failed, what drugs were prescribed and by whom, whether the screening protocols already on the books were followed, go unanswered. Healey described parenthood as "exhausting, isolating and overwhelming" and spoke of "physiological and hormonal changes that just leave you a different person after birth." All true. None of it explains how $2.25 million and voluntary nurse visits would have changed what happened in Duxbury.
Voters should watch whether the proposal moves through the legislature, how the money is allocated, and whether the screening mandates carry real accountability, or whether this is another case of a politician converting someone else's suffering into a news cycle.
Three children are gone. Their names deserve more than a line item.
