Photo of woman holding sign about her daughter and abortion rights was digitally manipulated

Social media users reacted strongly to a photo showing a woman standing with a young girl and holding a sign that said, "I want my daughter to have the right to abortion that I didn’t have."

"Someday your daughter is going to find this picture and despise you," one commenter wrote on Instagram.

But the photo was digitally altered.

The photo of the pro-abortion sign shared Nov. 20 and after drew millions of views on Instagram, X and TikTok.

Screenshot from Instagram

The Instagram post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)

The sign’s message was edited. We found an earlier version of the photo with a different message on the sign. In a photo published March 24, 2023, on a Mexican feminist and anticapitalist website, the woman’s sign read, "Soy mamá de la niña que jamás vas a tocar," or "I’m the mother of a girl you’ll never touch."

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Viral image

stated on November 20, 2024 in an Instagram post

“Abortion clinics warn they’ll go bankrupt if Democrat ‘sex strike’ continues.”

According to the website, the photograph was taken during a feminist march March 8, 2023, in Monterrey, Mexico. The message in the fabricated version is in type font; the message in the Spanish version is handwritten.

We found manipulated images of the sign in Spanish before the English version started trending. The image was shared on Instagram, Facebook and X in early November with the same fabricated pro-abortion message in Spanish: "Quiero que mi hija tenga el derecho a abortar que yo no tuve."

We rate the claim that a woman held a sign that said, "I want my daughter to have the right to abortion that I didn’t have," False.