A 4-year-old black girl became the banner of a pro-life anti-abortion group. Her mother had no idea until she saw the billboard.

• Tricia Fraser was taken aback when her daughter appeared in an anti-abortion ad without her consent.

• The mother of four said she had a flashback to the ordeal after the Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade.

• Her daughter Anissa was 4 when she posed for the photo used for the ad.

When Tricia Fraser first heard about the… overthrow of Roe v. Wadeshe was transported back to a time in 2011 when her young daughter unknowingly became the banner of the anti-abortion movement.

The mother of four was taken aback when a photo of her daughter Anissa was displayed on a billboard in New York City without her knowledge or consent.

Anissa, who was 4 years old when the photo was taken, was wearing a pink sundress and a white bow in her hair in the ad. The text above her head said, “The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb.”

“It was horrible,” Fraser of Passaic Park, New Jersey, told Insider. She added: “She was so sweet and so innocent, and using her image in that light was just awful.”

The billboard had been removed. But Fraser said she was taking legal action against Life Always, the anti-abortion organization that founded it.

“I was very sad about it and I wanted them to take it down,” said the 48-year-old. “I wanted to make hell about it, which I did.”

She added, “My outrage was because they used Anissa’s photo to portray African Americans in such a negative way.”

Fraser said the lawsuit — which included allegations of racism — was successful. But she declined to comment further on that aspect of the case.

Fraser said she believed in… abortion rights and was concerned about taking away women’s rights

Fraser said the Supreme Court… make a statementallowing each state to determine its own abortion laws triggered a flashback to the distress caused by the ad 11 years ago.

The single mom recalled how shocking it was not to know that Anissa’s photo — originally taken during a 2009 modeling shoot — would be used for a controversial campaign that Fraser didn’t support.

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She said that “as a mother of four daughters and grandmother of a 6-year-old girl,” she was sad for them, adding, “God forbid, if they ever find themselves in a position like this, they won’t be able to choose what to do.” want to do.”

Fraser said Anissa, who is now 18 and graduated from high school last week, was aware of the reversal of Supreme Court policy, and that the teen had previously “googled herself” and read about her unintended role in the abortion debate.

“She was too young to remember it at the time, but she came across it,” Fraser said.

The mother said the photographer who took Anissa’s photo 13 years ago said it would be used “for stock photography,” along with photos of Fraser’s other daughters, who are now between the ages of 16 and 26. Fraser had signed a release two years earlier at the photographer’s studio.

But while the agreement said the footage could be available to agencies like Getty Images, it said they couldn’t be used in “a slanderous way†

Fraser told Insider that friends notified her of the ad, which was attached to a high-rise building in downtown Manhattan.

The anti-abortion group that made the ad was accused of being ‘very offensive’

“Everyone could see it,” said Fraser, a former social worker. She said she drove right there to take a picture of the ad. Fraser said she later learned that Anissa’s face had appeared on billboards in other parts of the US and on anti-abortion leaflets that Life Always had distributed abroad.

2011 CBS8 wrote that Reverend Stephen Broden, a board member of Life Always Who’s Black himself, had likened abortion to a “genocidal plot.”

Letitia James, then a councilor for the Working Families Party in New York, said in a statement: “Every woman is entitled to personal choices regarding her body, and I respect different points of view.” She continued: “But it is very insulting to compare abortion to terrorism and genocide.”

At the time, media reports said Planned Parenthood, the reproductive and sexual health care provider, called the Life Always crusade “an abusive and condescending attempt to stigmatize and disgrace African American women and send a divisive message around race in order to restrict access to medical care.”

Read the original article Insider