Chronicling the ongoing intersectional struggle to liberate women — inclusively defined as the legacy kind and transgender people — from the Patriarchy™, one microaggression at a time.
Hot take, bad idea
Postpartum depression and its much rarer cousin, postpartum psychosis, are absolutely real phenomena, the result of a convergence of several factors, primarily sleep deprivation, the psychological pressure of new motherhood, and the massive measurable hormone swings that occur after giving birth.
Even if you don’t understand the exact physiological mechanisms at play, postpartum depression seems intuitive.
My wife recently had a baby about eight months ago, so I’ve seen the toll firsthand — though thankfully not nearly as severe as Lindsay Clancy’s apparently was.
Women who suffer it deserve support.
Via Brown University Health (emphasis added):
Postpartum depression is a mood disorder that affects women after childbirth. Like clinical depression, postpartum depression causes women to experience feelings of extreme sadness, anxiety, hopelessness and exhaustion that can make it difficult for them to fulfill daily needs and care for themselves and others. It may cause women to feel like they can’t or don’t want to bond with or care for their child.
Postpartum depression can develop any time during the first year after birth, but it most commonly affects mothers during the first three weeks after birth. It can sometimes be hard to tell the difference between postpartum depression and the normal stress and exhaustion of being a new parent. Many women experience some symptoms of depression after childbirth, but these “baby blues” are not severe and generally go away within a few days or a week. Postpartum depression symptoms are prolonged and severe. If you experience strong negative feelings, such as sadness, hopelessness, and lack of interest, that interfere with daily life and last for prolonged periods of time – for weeks or even months – you may have postpartum depression.
While the exact cause of postpartum depression is not known, hormonal and physical changes after birth and the stress of caring for a newborn may play a role. Women who previously experienced depression have a higher risk of developing postpartum depression.
If, as a conservative, you were interested in advancing the ideology of natalism — the theory that nuclear families having children is a stabilizing social good — the least you would do is offer rhetorical support to new mothers who are struggling.
I would prefer some type of proactive government initiative to help them out. Small government hardliners and fiscal hawks would quibble with that prescription.
Related: Liberal Banshees, Distraught Over Election Results, Convene to Scream at Lake Michigan
In any case, what you definitely wouldn’t do is what Matt Walsh did: come out swinging with the hottest hot take you can conjure up for attention on social media.
A lot of people aren't going to want to hear this but much of the "depression" that parents (and not just moms) suffer after child birth is due not so much to hormones but to the fact that children, especially babies, are demanding and difficult and require us to subordinate our own needs and desires for their sake. The more selfish you are, the more of an adjustment it's going to be...
This is especially true of Lindsay Clancy, who in fact had more far help, and was getting far more medical and psychiatric attention, than the average person. But ultimately nobody could solve her "depression" because its real source was a selfish hatred of her children. No drug can treat that. It can make things worse, though.
A lot of people aren't going to want to hear this but much of the "depression" that parents (and not just moms) suffer after child birth is due not so much to hormones but to the fact that children, especially babies, are demanding and difficult and require us to subordinate our…
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) August 17, 2026
In addition to being immoral and callous and stupid, painting mothers battling postpartum depression with such a broad brush in this way — in an environment in which they’re already constantly bombarded with Democrat propaganda that conservatives are trying to take the most overblown speculative feminist fever-dreams of patriarchal subjugation from dystopian fiction to dystopian reality — is political malpractice.
Related: Hillary Claims ‘Climate Change’ Killed 500,000 Last Year, ‘Particularly Pregnant Women’
It’s true that the modern feminist woman is a raging, entitled narcissist with an extra helping of mental illness sprinkled on top, induced by the psychiatric drugs she’s given and the cultural milieu designed to drive her to insanity.
No one has to try to make the case to me; I write about this phenomenon as much or more than anyone in the media and will do so in the near future in the context of the Lindsay Clancy response.
It’s also true that there is some subset of women who play up, or in some cases totally fabricate, their postpartum depression/psychosis for attention, especially given the incentives on social media.
But it’s definitely not all of them.
That’s a nuanced take, but social media doesn’t encourage nuance; it encourages nuclear rhetorical war.
Hence Matt Walsh’s claim that women experiencing postpartum depression are “selfish.”
