A large, golden statue on top of a New York City courthouse that smacks of the satanic was created for the purpose of promoting the killing of unborn babies in abortions.
Pakistani-born artist Shahzia Sikander said she created the “NOW” statue as a “form of resistance” in response to the death of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an idol of abortion activists, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade last June, according to the Catholic News Agency.
“She is a fierce woman and a form of resistance in a space that has historically been dominated by patriarchal representation,” she told the New York Times. “With Ginsburg’s death and the reversal of Roe, there was a setback to women’s constitutional progress.”
The 53-year-old artist told the newspaper that she titled her piece “NOW” because women’s ability to have abortions is at risk right “now.”
The U.S. Supreme Court ruling Dobbs v. Jackson got rid of Roe and began allowing states to protect unborn babies from abortion again. Currently, 14 states prohibit killing unborn babies and more are fighting in court to do the same, but The Satanic Temple and others have filed lawsuits to stop these life-saving laws.
Last week, Sikander’s piece attracted outrage online, in large part, because the statue appears to be satanic: a naked, golden woman with braids fashioned into horns coming out of her head and twisted, root-like arms and legs, according to photos in the New York Times. Its only clothing, a collar, serves as a tribute to Ginsburg.
Please follow LifeNews on Rumble for the latest pro-life videos.
Sikander said the horns represent female “sovereignty” and “autonomy,” and the statue itself depicts a “fierce woman.”
Images used by Satanists and The Satanic Temple often depict Satan with goat-like horns.
The artist has not mentioned anything overtly religious or satanic in connection with her NOW piece, but she has used similar imagery in the past to represent a “kind of alternative deity,” the arts magazine Hyperallergic noted last year.
Women with horns and roots for feet are a “recurring image” in Sikander’s pieces, according to the magazine. In 2019, “Sikander described this root-baring, floating female figure as ‘self-nourishing,’ a kind of alternative deity that ‘refuses to belong, to be fixed, to be grounded, to be stereotyped.’ This deity can be everywhere at once, and eludes any defined identity,” the magazine reports.
The NOW statue was commissioned by the Madison Square Park Conservancy and Public Art of the University of Houston System. It recently was installed on top of the Courthouse of the Appellate Division, First Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York in the city.
In New York, the law allows unborn babies to be aborted for basically any reason up to birth. And in New York City, abortions often outnumber births in the African American community. Earlier this month, city leaders announced plans to begin buying abortion pills to distribute at city health clinics to expand abortions even more, the New York Post reports.
Meanwhile, pro-abortion politicians’ and abortion activists’ new talking points frequently include fighting “like hell” to keep the killing of unborn babies legal, and “Hail, Satan!” sometimes is shouted at pro-abortion protests. In recent years, The Satanic Temple also has filed numerous lawsuits on religious grounds that challenge laws protecting unborn babies’ lives. The group claims abortion is a religious ritual.
