Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Oprah Winfrey opened the conversation by stating the aim is not to retry Lindsay Clancy's case but to address how society can better respond to postpartum mental health issues. She recalled that as early as 1986, there was no language for such conditions, and mothers were labeled as monsters or evil. She noted the deaths of Cora, Dawson, and Callan have shifted the national conversation. Winfrey referenced the Mothers Against Drunk Driving movement as a model for cultural change. She introduced Meg Hamp, a labor and delivery nurse who worked with Clancy for seven years and testified for the defense. Hamp described Clancy as a caring nurse who loved her children, expressed disbelief at the murders, and said she never saw signs of bipolar disorder. Hamp also discussed introducing Clancy to the Andrea Yates case and her devastation over the mistrial.
Key takeaways
Winfrey says the Lindsay Clancy case marks a watershed cultural moment for postpartum mental health conversation.
Winfrey recalled that since 1986, there was no language for postpartum mental health issues; mothers were called monsters.
Meg Hamp testified she saw no signs of bipolar disorder in Clancy during their seven years working together.
Hamp said Clancy loved her children and lived for them, making the murders impossible for her to believe.
Hamp was devastated by the mistrial because Clancy may have to go through the trial again.
We're not here to retry Lindsay Clancy's case or debate the minute details or online theories. I've been talking to mothers who suffered from postpartum mental health issues now for decades. And way back when when we first started having these conversations on The Oprah Winfrey Show as early as 1986, there was not even a language for it. Nobody called it anything except these women are monsters or these women are evil. And over the years, I've interviewed many, many, many mothers who have killed their children. And we can all see that the deaths of Cora, Dawson, and Callan have caused this national conversation to shift and erupt like never before.
So, that's why I wanted to bring together doctors and psychiatrists and legal scholars and journalists and parents here today to Boston to unpack what has been blowing up on social media, on your family text chains, at work, and in the school parking lot. And my intention here today is to ask this question: How can we as a culture, as a society, do better? How do we use this moment to move ourselves forward and not just all of our opinions and yakking about it for something this big? Can you feel it? Something this big in the culture means the culture is supposed to shift.
It feels to me like, you know, many other movements that I've witnessed, who've been old enough to witness, you know, when there was a time when people just drove drunk and they killed people and nobody said anything. And then, what was created? The Mothers Against Drunk Driving. And that movement really changed the way we looked at alcohol and the consumption of alcohol and alcoholism in this country. It changed the laws for driving. It saved so many lives. So, today we want to use this summit in a moment to move forward, and I want to start by introducing Meg Hamp. She is a labor and delivery nurse who worked with Lindsay Clancy for seven years, and you may recognize Meg because she testified on behalf of the defense. And here's a short part of it.
There was a particular patient that Lindsey was on staff when this patient arrived. It was a patient that arrived to the unit that had plans to harm herself while she was pregnant. And we had a conversation. Lindsey was brand new. It was the summer that she had just started. And we had a conversation about mental health in pregnancy and postpartum. And I asked her if she had ever heard of the Andrea Yates case, and she hadn't. And I explained that to her, and she cried. And she said, "How could a mother hurt her children?"
Lindsey loved being a nurse. She was a light on our unit. She brought warmth and compassion to the room. She brought emotion to the rooms that we were in. I loved working with her. I think our team loved working with her. She brought a peace to our team that nobody else has been able to bring.
I often remember looking up after a baby was born and Lindsey was my second nurse in the delivery, and just looking over the mother, and Lindsey with tears in her eyes because birth was just so emotional for her and she felt that for so many other women, not just her friends or her family.
We had a patient on the unit that was suffering from some mental health challenges and there was just a lot of question around that. Lindsey being a new nurse, and there was another new nurse on the floor at the time, and I just asked her if she had ever heard of the Andrea Yates case. And she hadn't. Seems like such a big case in the maternal health world.
Winfrey, O. (2026, September 11). Oprah on How the Lindsay Clancy Case Is a Watershed Moment [Interview transcript]. Oprah. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1337767/
MLA
Oprah Winfrey. "Oprah on How the Lindsay Clancy Case Is a Watershed Moment." Oprah, 11 Sep. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1337767/.
BibTeX
@misc{winfrey2026_1337767,
author = {Oprah Winfrey},
title = {Oprah on How the Lindsay Clancy Case Is a Watershed Moment},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Oprah. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {sep},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1337767/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
