When she jumped out a second-story window of her suburban Massachusetts home, Lindsay Clancy did not put her hands out to break her fall. This detail from the weekslong trial of Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse charged with murdering her three small children, is one I cannot shake. Both the defense and the prosecution agree that Clancy suffered from mental illness in the period leading up to the killings and her suicide attempt. "She really did a free-fall dive headfirst" onto the "hard, frozen ground," said Dr. Elizabeth Laposata, a forensic pathologist and former chief medical examiner in Rhode Island, who testified for the defense on Aug. 18.

Clancy, who pleaded not guilty, pitched herself from the window after cutting her wrists and taking pills. She is now paralyzed from the waist down. She has said she heard a voice telling her to kill the kids and herself before she strangled them. The defense argued that she is not criminally responsible because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis. The prosecution argued that even though she was depressed, the killings were premeditated, and her suicide attempt was not serious—a cynical, premeditated calculation. After seven days of deliberation, the jury was deadlocked, and the case was declared a mistrial.

Over the past month, I have struggled to comprehend why so many people, mostly women, followed every moment of Clancy's trial and why so many strangers showed up to support her. Her experience was both awful and foreign to me, and three beautiful children—Cora, Dawson and Callan—are dead. Hearing Clancy's suicide attempt described as unserious in the prosecution's closing argument, I finally understood: The state is a stand-in for the way women—and especially mothers—are judged, dissected and read in the worst possible light.

What she did is horrible beyond comprehension. But to believe that she did it for wholly selfish reasons ignores the sorry state of postpartum health care and the historical lack of investment in understanding women's bodies and minds. Even a middle-class, attractive white mother who appeared universally beloved does not get the benefit of credibility. A woman can slit her wrists, take pills and throw herself out a window, and still be painted as a faker, a liar and a manipulator.