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 at the courthouse. I had to take breaks in paying attention to the coverage, because the whole thing felt ghoulish. Her experience was both awful and foreign to me, and three beautiful children — Cora, Dawson and Callan — are dead. I wanted only to look away, and no outcome seemed fair.

But hearing Clancy’s suicide attempt described as unserious again in the prosecution’s closing argument, I finally understood what has attracted so many to her case: The state is a stand-in for the way women — and especially mothers — are judged, dissected and read in the worst possible light. Don’t get me wrong: 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 or desire to understand women’s bodies and minds.

Even a middle-class, attractive white mother who appeared to be universally beloved and admired by her co-workers and friends before she got sick does not get the benefit of credibility. A woman can slit her wrists, take pills and throw herself out a window, her survival instincts apparently so blunted by her mental illness that she did not even try to stop herself from hitting the ground, and still be painted as a faker, a liar and a tightly regimented manipulator.

The prosecution’s evidence that Clancy is a control freak is that she left detailed instructions for a nanny about what to feed her children, like cutting sweet potatoes into chunks, and that she cared about their sleep schedules. I imagine that if she did not do these things, the prosecution would have painted her as a woman who never cared about her children in the first place.

A woman can ask for psychiatric help multiple times in multiple ways and write the phrase “horrible thoughts” over and over again in her journal, and the prosecution can argue that she’s culpable for her mental state, in part, because she was not a “compliant” patient. Its evidence of noncompliance is that Clancy did not take all of the medication that was prescribed to her, even though she was prescribed 13 medications in the four months leading up to the killings and reported severe side effects with some of them, including unbearable insomnia.