On the grounds of the Arkansas State Capitol, just behind a large stone tablet etched with the Ten Commandments, is a grassy meadow designated for a second state-sanctioned project. This one, envisioned as a long wall of luscious green plants, will serve as Arkansas’s “Monument to Unborn Children.”
In 2023, an artist named Lakey Goff won a public contest to design the state’s official anti-abortion memorial. Her entry — which called for 1,400 plants and a Bible quotation, as well as the piped-in sounds of Arkansas waterfalls — stood out from a raft of more literal-minded entries featuring fetuses and infants. Ms. Goff has described her “living wall” as a gesture of reconciliation after decades of conflict over abortion policy.
“We’re not at war with each other anymore,” Ms. Goff said last year to the members of the state commission that chose her design. “This is about healing.”
But the monument remains unbuilt, months after work on it was supposed to start, not least because the debate over abortion has continued to rage. Even in one of the most conservative states in the nation, bitterness and discord remain, three years after the Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion. Healing seems like a distant dream.
Arkansas has long been hailed as the “most pro-life state in America” by Americans United for Life, a leading anti-abortion group. On June 24, 2022, the day that Roe was overturned, the state enacted one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, with no exceptions for rape or incest.
But last year, abortion rights activists gathered more than 100,000 signatures from many corners of the state for a ballot initiative that would have restored the right to an abortion up to 18 weeks after conception. Anti-abortion forces described the effort as “radical” and countered with a statewide “decline to sign” campaign.
In the end, the signatures did not matter. The initiative was blocked in July by the secretary of state at the time, who said that the organizers had failed to submit required paperwork. The Arkansas Supreme Court later upheld that decision.
In the legislative session that ended in late April, Republican legislators, who claimed that the signature-gathering effort had been riddled with fraud, passed bills making it harder to get any initiative on the ballot.
The state chapter of the League of Women Voters has sued over the new laws, saying they spelled “the death of direct democracy in Arkansas.” Ezra Smith, a Fayetteville lawyer who worked on the ballot effort, said the chances were “very high” that abortion rights supporters would try to put a similar question on the ballot in 2026.
All of this has overshadowed the wall project. The monument, by law, must be built with private donations. But as of late April, only about $19,000 of the estimated $950,000 construction costs had been raised, according to the Arkansas secretary of state’s office. A bigger priority, for anti-abortion activists, has been to keep fighting their battle.
“I think the ballot initiative did grab a lot of the attention,” said State Senator Kim Hammer, a Republican and one of the sponsors of the legislation that mandated the monument’s creation.
As a result, much of the fund-raising effort has fallen to Ms. Goff, an Arkansas native who was working at a flower shop when she said that God gave her the plan for the wall.
To the extent that the American political divide is also cultural, Ms. Goff, 51, has lived on both sides of it: For years, she was known in progressive Little Rock circles as an artist, kundalini yoga instructor and reader of auras. At the time, she had little interest in the abortion debate.
But a few years before the design contest, Ms. Goff re-embraced the Christian faith she had learned from her missionary parents.
Ms. Goff spoke to The New York Times in June 2024, but more recently declined to be interviewed. In recent months, she has spoken to religious groups and appeared on Christian talk shows, promoting her wall as the capstone of a personal redemption narrative.
“This is a wall about healing mothers and families and even fathers who have suffered the loss of abortion and the taking of an innocent life and all that goes with that,” she said on a podcast in January. “The guilt. The shame. The remorse.”
Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who served as the White House press secretary in President Trump’s first term, signed the bill calling for the monument in March 2023, soon after she took office. It easily passed both chambers of a legislature full of religious conservatives. But there were voices of dissent from within the Republican camp, with some noting that the issue was hardly settled.
State Representative Steve Unger, a Baptist minister who opposes abortion, said at the time that he feared the monument would be perceived as “gloating” and “spiking the football” by Arkansans with different views on the subject.
“Public memorials to our nation’s wars where we faced an external threat are right and proper,” Mr. Unger said, according to the news outlet Arkansas Advocate. “A memorial to an ongoing culture war where we seem to be shooting at each other is not.”
Liberals scoffed at the contest, anticipating it would be a lamentable exercise in poor taste. Austin Gelder, editor of the left-leaning Arkansas Times sarcastically offered her own proposals: “A glass woman whose transparent belly reveals the fetus within? Sperm meeting egg as Jesus beams down from the clouds?”
On Dec. 12, 2023, nine submissions were considered by the state’s nine-member Capitol Arts and Grounds Commission. One design featured an empty tomb. Another showed an infant or fetus, blindfolded and suspended in the air by an umbilical cord.
Tony Leraris, an architect and member of the commission, called Ms. Goff’s design the “least offensive” of the choices. Ms. Goff noted that other, similar walls had been well received, including the one near the World Trade Center complex in Manhattan near the 9/11 Memorial.
In her interview with The New York Times last year, Ms. Goff described her wall as honoring “not just the unborn, but really, everyone who’s alive, who has the breath of life.”
But her language has not always encouraged healing. On one recent religious podcast, she referred to the former constitutional right to abortion as “a death covenant with the enemy.”
In commission meetings, Ms. Goff has been the chief advocate for the project as it has run up against practical concerns — among them, the time, attention and money it will take to keep the wall of plants alive and healthy.
In a phone interview this spring, Mr. Leraris, the architect, who has mixed feelings about abortion, said he was also worried about the potential for vandalism, given how hot emotions continue to run over abortion. He noted that the State Capitol’s Ten Commandments statue was destroyed the day after it was erected in 2017 by a man who crashed into it with his Dodge Dart after expressing concerns about the separation of church and state.
“Someone could easily poison all those plants,” Mr. Leraris said of the wall. “It’s like all those fruitcakes setting Teslas on fire because they don’t like Elon Musk.”
The American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas filed a federal lawsuit over the Ten Commandments sculpture on church-state grounds. Christine Althoff, the group’s board president, said the group currently had no plans to challenge the wall, although she added that the inclusion of the Bible verse could invite a First Amendment claim.
In an interview this month, State Representative Stephen D. Bright, the chair of the grounds commission, said he was hoping to tweak the design of the wall to bring the cost down to about $700,000.
Mr. Leraris has wondered if it might be easier to put up a simple plaque.
Emily Cochrane contributed reporting.
Richard Fausset, based in Atlanta, writes about the American South, focusing on politics, culture, race, poverty and criminal justice.
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