A question has been making the rounds on social media and in sidewalk interviews this month: who does more harm to women, Sydney Sweeney or Lindsay Clancy? That it can be asked with a straight face and a microphone tells us a great deal about the moral condition of the country, and the answers many women have offered online tell us even more.
Consider the two women being compared. Sweeney, the Euphoria actress, stars in a new commercial for Novig, a sports prediction market in which she holds an equity stake, posing nude behind strategically placed footballs, tennis gear, and a basketball hoop, and female Olympians and professional athletes have lined up to condemn it. Clancy, a former nurse from Duxbury, Massachusetts, strangled her three children, five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson, and eight-month-old Callan, in January 2023, and then tried to take her own life. Her defense never disputed that she killed them; it argued that postpartum psychosis left her not criminally responsible. On September 4, after five weeks of testimony and roughly 38 hours of deliberation, her trial ended in a mistrial when a single juror held out against that verdict.
One of these women made a crude and cynical advertisement, while the other took three lives that God entrusted to her care. That a vocal share of the online commentariat can look at those facts and conclude the actress is the greater threat to womanhood is not a quirk of the algorithm. It is the fruit of a moral framework that has lost the ability to rank wrongs.
The case against Sweeney is not frivolous, and conservatives should not pretend otherwise simply because progressive women are the ones making it. The ad is exactly what its critics say it is: a woman’s body used as bait to draw young men toward betting, an industry whose explosive growth since the Supreme Court opened the door to legal sports wagering in 2018 has come with rising alarm about problem gambling. Scripture does not flatter this kind of display. “Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain,” says Proverbs 31:30, and a culture that sells vice with skin runs directly against the dignity the Bible assigns to women. But immodesty and complicity in a vice industry are sins against prudence and propriety, not the shedding of innocent blood.
On that second point, the moral law is not ambiguous. “Thou shalt not kill,” the Sixth Commandment reads, and Psalm 127 calls children a heritage of the Lord, a trust rather than a possession. Yet during Clancy’s trial, several hundred women dressed in pink lined the street outside Plymouth Superior Court, some calling out “I love you” as her attorney walked past. Online, a sizable movement has cast her as the true victim, a symbol of every overwhelmed mother failed by the medical system, while Cora, Dawson, and Callan fade into the background of their own story.
Honesty requires acknowledging what is real in the defense. Postpartum psychosis is a genuine and terrifying illness that affects roughly one in a thousand new mothers, and Clancy had voluntarily admitted herself to McLean Hospital only weeks before the killings. Massachusetts law asks whether a defendant could tell right from wrong or conform her conduct to the law, and eleven of twelve jurors apparently concluded she could not. That is a legitimate legal question, and courts rather than comment sections should resolve it. Compassion for a mother in the grip of madness is not the problem.
The problem is what happens when compassion is severed from judgment. There is a real difference between saying mental illness may reduce a person’s legal culpability and treating a woman who strangled her children as a cause to be championed. There is a difference between grieving the failures of maternal mental health care and gathering in coordinated colors outside a courthouse while three small graves go unmentioned. The first is mercy, and the second is the inversion the prophet warned against: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil” (Isaiah 5:20).
The pattern is not new. In 2001 Andrea Yates drowned her five children in the bathtub of her Houston-area home; after her first conviction was overturned, a second jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity in 2006, and she has remained in state psychiatric care. Even then, the National Organization for Women rallied to her side and cast her as a victim of an unsupportive husband and a failed system. What has changed in the quarter century since is the scale: what was once a press release from an activist organization is now a viral movement with its own dress code.
It is worth being precise about how large that movement is, because precision is more damning than exaggeration. A YouGov survey taken in the days after the mistrial found a real but modest gender gap: women were about ten points less likely than men to say they would convict, and only about a quarter of women supported a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. Most American women, in other words, have not lost their moral bearings. The confusion is concentrated in the loudest online spaces and in the activist corners of feminism that treat every controversy as a referendum on whether women may ever be held responsible for anything.
That impulse is the real engine of this story. A strain of modern feminism has spent decades insisting that women are fully capable moral agents when it comes to careers, bodies, and choices, then retreats into the language of pure victimhood the moment a woman commits an act of real evil. Sweeney is condemned because her choice offends the movement’s politics of image, and Clancy is shielded because condemning her would require admitting that a woman, and a mother, can do something monstrous. Both reactions deny women full moral adulthood. Jesus had words for leaders who fussed over trivial offenses while ignoring grave ones: they “strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel” (Matthew 23:24).
Both women have done harm, and a serious culture can say so plainly. Sweeney has lent her body to the cheapening of women and the marketing of vice, and Christian women are right to criticize it. But a society that finds a nude ad more threatening to womanhood than the killing of three children has not grown more sensitive to women’s dignity; it has forgotten what dignity is for. The task for Christians, and especially for Christian women, is to recover moral proportion out loud: to call immodesty what it is, to call the taking of innocent life what it is, to extend mercy to the mentally ill without extending applause, and to say the names Cora, Dawson, and Callan every time someone tries to make this story about anyone else.
Hannah Nelson is the Vice President of American Faith Media. Any opinions or independent views expressed within this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of any affiliated organizations or publishers.