Outside a Mᴀssachusetts courthouse, hundreds of women — some holding their own babies — rally for the mother who strangled Cora, Dawson and Callan. A culture that turns the perpetrator into a folk hero has lost its moral compᴀss.

Outside Plymouth Superior Court this week, a scene unfolded that many Americans still struggle to process. Hundreds of women gathered in support of Lindsay Clancy, the mother on trial for murdering her three young children. Some held infants in their arms. Some made heart hands. Some cheered as members of her defense team drove past.

Clancy does not deny killing 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan with her own hands. Her defense argues she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and therefore cannot be held criminally responsible. The women standing outside the courthouse have no such medical claim. Their presence raises a harder cultural question: how did a mother who killed three children become, in the eyes of so many, a more compelling victim than the children themselves?

The Horror at the Center of the Case

Whatever Clancy’s mental state on the night of the killings, the central fact remains unchanged. The last image those three children saw was the person charged above all others with loving, protecting and caring for them — violently taking their lives.

Yet in the public narrative that has grown around the trial, the three ᴅᴇᴀᴅ children have steadily receded into the background. An online community and a visible group of courthouse supporters now focus intensely on Clancy’s suffering, her medical history and the claim that “the system failed her.” The children cannot organize rallies, post on social media or wear matching colors. Their mother has an entire movement doing that for her — and she has not asked them to stop or to shift their sympathy toward the lives she ended.

Valid Questions, Dangerous Conclusions

There are legitimate questions about postpartum psychosis, psychiatric medication and the medical care Clancy received in the months before the murders. Her mental state is central to the criminal case. A jury will decide whether that mental state absolves her of legal responsibility. Compᴀssion for serious mental illness is not the issue.

The problem begins when that compᴀssion is transformed into something else: the elevation of the perpetrator into a folk hero while the victims are treated as secondary details. Clancy’s supporters repeatedly insist that “the system failed her,” a phrase that shifts agency from an individual to an amorphous collection of insтιтutions. Yet by every available account presented in the public discussion of the case, Clancy had extensive support.

She saw multiple medical providers who prescribed and adjusted psychiatric medications. Both sets of grandparents were involved. The family used daycare and a nanny. Her husband took months of paternity leave and later worked from home so he could help his struggling wife. On the day the children died, Clancy asked her husband Patrick to leave the house to pick up dinner and medication. While he was gone, she killed all three of their children.

Some of the women outside the courthouse have gone further, casting Patrick as a villain in the story. That inversion of responsibility only deepens the sense that the original victims have been displaced.

The Strange Inconsistency of Agency

There is something especially striking about watching women who describe themselves as feminists embrace this narrative. For generations, women have demanded to be treated as full moral actors — capable of making decisions, accepting consequences, holding authority and being judged by the same standards applied to men.

Yet when confronted with a woman who committed one of the most horrific acts imaginable, that insistence on agency suddenly becomes negotiable. A woman can run a corporation, command soldiers, perform surgery, raise children or lead a country. But when she commits an atrocity, an army of supporters appears to explain that “the system” did it to her.

This is not empathy. It is selective erasure.

What the Children Cannot Say

Cora, Dawson and Callan cannot tell anyone what happened inside their home that night. They cannot describe their fear. They cannot ask strangers to remember their names. They cannot correct the public record when the focus drifts entirely onto their mother’s pain.

A culture that extends elaborate compᴀssion to a mentally ill woman while allowing three murdered children to fade from view has not become more enlightened. It has simply lost the ability to distinguish between victim and perpetrator.

When mothers gather outside a courthouse carrying their own children and cheer for a mother who strangled hers, the most disturbing question is not only what happened inside Lindsay Clancy’s mind. It is what has happened to the culture that now finds her the more compelling figure in this tragedy.

The jury will decide the legal question of criminal responsibility. The rest of society still has to answer a moral one: whether the three children who can no longer speak will be remembered as the true victims — or whether their deaths will continue to be overshadowed by the movement built around the woman who ended their lives.