On the heels of Lindsay Clancy’s mistrial, Democratic Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, feeling pressured to do something to address concerns over postpartum mental health issues, announced an expanded state program that critics say amounts to home surveillance of new moms. The program already serves around 3,000 births annually, but Mealy wants all Massachusetts families to have access to a voluntary and “free” home visit, conducted by a registered nurse, to monitor moms and find signs of mood and anxiety disorders sooner rather than later — signs that point to postpartum depression.
The case of Clancy, a Massachusetts mom charged with first-degree murder for strangling her three children, ages five, three, and eight months old, to death in the basement of her home, captivated the country for weeks and unleashed a torrent of social media content defending the 36-year-old. Clancy’s fans believed she committed the murders in a state of “psychosis,” suffered from postpartum depression, and could not access proper mental health care to remedy that which drove her to madness. As with any politician, when the public latches on to a particular issue that drives headlines and generates online buzz, Healey figured she might as well capitalize and reward her constituents by giving the Department of Public Health more taxpayer funds to waste.
Leaving aside that the program does not appear to be some earth-shattering, unconstitutional intrusion of civil liberties — criticism stemmed from Healey’s woeful choice of words during a podcast appearance, in which she suggested the visitations are mandatory if you have a child — there is something to be said of politicians who use a crisis, or in the case of Clancy, a viral, emotional event, as cover for ill-conceived policies and laws.
In fact, so much of American history is driven by crises and shocks — unforeseen events that burst out and jolt the country in an entirely new, sometimes dangerous, direction. Some of the worst pieces of federal and state legislation and presidential mandates were born during these moments, when emotions ran high and the public, crippled by fear or enthralled by a moral panic, demanded immediate action without considering its long-term consequences for civil liberties. The phrase “Never let a crisis go to waste” was popularized in our modern imaginations by the slick Obama World operator, Rahm Emanuel, in the late 2000s. But it has always been the MO of the political and ruling classes for as long as the United States has existed, and our civil liberties have suffered for it.