The anti-abortion activists behind the efforts say it’s funded entirely through private donors. Ashley Sosa, of the Texas Alliance for Life, testified as much before the state Senate in April. But that doesn’t make any aspect of this less gross.
Just last year, we learned three different women in Texas—Porsha Ngumezi, Josseli Barnica, and Nevaeh Crain—died as a result of not receiving timely emergency abortion care due to their state’s respective abortion bans. Instead of memorializing their lives or even just acknowledging their deaths at the hands of the state, Texas Republicans want to build a propaganda statue to both justify and glorify the laws that cost these women their lives.
Meanwhile, in January, we learned that in 2023, the first full year after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, six children under 12 were among at least 100 minors who had to leave Texas to have abortions. Child welfare advocates said many of the minors’ pregnancies resulted from rape and that every child’s pregnancy in the youngest age category resulted from rape. (The age of consent in Texas is 17.) Still, Texas’ abortion ban, which threatens providers with life in prison among other steep penalties, offers no exception for rape.
As bizarre as the idea of an anti-abortion monument is, Texas is hardly the first state to try to set one up on Capitol grounds. In 2018 and 2023, respectively, Tennessee and Arkansas both passed similar bills to memorialize their abortion bans with Capitol monuments. Arkansas Republicans set out to build a monument to recognize “the 236,243-plus babies that were never born as a result of Roe v. Wade,” a figure that seems to be entirely made-up; but two years later, the monument still hasn’t been built after no one could decide on a “tasteful” design for it. Meanwhile, despite approving a “Tennessee Monument to Unborn Children, In Memory of the Victims of Abortion: Babies, Women, and Men” back in 2018, the state hasn’t built its proposed anti-abortion monument either… because as recently as 2023, even in the deep-red state, it received $0 in donations required to pay for its construction.
So, here’s hoping Texas’ proposed monument meets a similarly humiliating fate.
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