Last week the state’s Senate passed a bill 23-3 that would require the Capitol to “develop and implement a plan for the commissioning of the Tennessee Monument to Unborn Children.” The state House, also with a GOP majority, voted 63–15 for a version of the bill last week, and will vote on it again before sending it to Republican governor Bill Haslam’s desk. The HB 2381 bill was sponsored by two Republicans, Rep. Jerry Sexton and Sen. Steve Southerland. According to the legislation, the monument will be “funded by non-state sources” but it will still be erected on the state ground of the capitol in Nashville.
When this bill was introduced in March, some linked the memorial to current statues memorializing victims of the Holocaust and slavery. “Both of these monuments that are already here recognize the atrocities occurred because human beings were treated as less than human,” Rep. Bill Dunn (R) said, according to Memphis Daily News. “In both cases, the vulnerable and defenseless were subjected to the will of the powerful. The taking of life of the baby in the womb is related to this brand of inhumanity.”
If the monument is erected, it would be the Tennessee’s second memorial dedicated to “victims” of abortion. The National Memorial, located in Chattanooga and founded in 1994, is dedicated to healing generations of pain associated with the loss of aborted and miscarried children, their website reads.
The memorial will also include the inscription: “Tennessee Monument to Unborn Children, In Memory of the Victims of Abortion: Babies, Women, and Men.” There are currently no specifics about what the statue would look like and how large it would be, the Huffington Post reports.
On the other side, there is the country’s largest provider of sex education, Planned Parenthood, whose programs reached 1.5 million people through education and outreach this year, according to their annual report. They performed 321,384 abortions in 2016 but they actually helped those women who have been raped or too young to become mothers or didn’t want to give birth to children they would not be able to take care of.
Photo Credits: Clinic Quotes
