Over a dozen Republican politicians gathered to support their plans for the Tennessee Monument to Unborn Children last month. The commissioned work will reside on state grounds near the capitol building in Nashville.
“While the baby can be seen as the obvious victim, this memorial will also be for other victims: the women coerced into abortion, the fathers who can’t protect their unborn child, the brothers and sisters who lose a sibling, and society as a whole who becomes coarsened because life is cheapened,” he said.
This week, their measure, House Bill 2381, passed in the state Senate with a majority of votes in the affirmative.
According to The Charlotte Observer, the memorial will not use public funds but will be paid for through private donations.
The Charlotte Observer also notes this isn’t the first monument of its kind in the state. In Chattanooga, a 50-foot wall was erected in the spot of a former women’s clinic as a memorial to the “unborn,” which holds words from those seeking “post-abortion healing,” according to the monument’s site.
Tennessee carries a history of restricting access to abortions, including instituting a mandatory waiting period before the procedure and a requirement for doctors offering the procedure to tell their patients of options to continue the pregnancy.
A number of abortion advocates including Planned Parenthood have renounced the move for a memorial of this kind, saying the monument’s purpose is to shame women who have chosen the still legal procedure.
A spokesperson for the local Planned Parenthood chapter said, “Our initial reaction to this proposal is that it’s another form of political posturing to further create a hostile environment toward reproductive health.”
The current plans for the memorial also include a mention of unborn children lost from miscarriage, which critics say conflates the purposeful choice to end a pregnancy with the unintentional end of a pregnancy by miscarriage.
