Pro-choice advocates descended on the Texas State Capitol on Tuesday dressed as the women from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in a powerful demonstration of opposition to the state’s many abortion restrictions.
The 20 protesters dressed up as the “handmaids” from the book (and now TV show) while they held up signs with a timeline of the steady rollback of abortion rights in Texas. One protester dressed in all black held a sign saying “30 ABORTION RESTRICTIONS & REGULATIONS INTRODUCED (2017).”
The women surrounded three other advocates who read from women’s personal testimonies about their attempts to get abortions. You can hear their stories in the live video of the protest by NARAL Pro-Choice Texas below:
NARAL Pro-Choice Texas expects that five abortion-restriction bills will come up for debate in the state’s House before Thursday. If passed, the bills could defund Planned Parenthood in the state, ban donating fetal tissue from an abortion to help science and research, and require cremation and burial of fetal tissue after an abortion, according to the organization.
Margaret Atwood, the author of the book that inspired the popular TV series The Handmaid’s Tale, retweeted images of the protest on Twitter.