New legislation would repeal key law used to jail pro-lifers
Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) introduced a bill on Tuesday that would repeal the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a law the Biden DOJ used repeatedly to jail pro-life Americans.
The FACE Act makes it a federal crime “to use force with the intent to injure, intimidate and interfere with anyone” who provides abortion services. Federal prosecutors often stretch the Clinton-era law to cover Americans who protest abortion, even when they do so peacefully.
“Americans just spent the last four years being targeted by a weaponized justice system. The FACE Act was one of the primary weapons of abuse — being used to politically target, arrest, and jail pro-life Americans for speaking out and standing up for life,” Rep. Roy said. “While President Trump and his team are already fast at work reversing the damage of the J6 political prosecutions and persecutions through pardons and commutations, I am hopeful those targeted under the FACE Act will be given similar relief.”
“Now that we have a Republican trifecta in the House, Senate, and White House, Congress should move quickly to repeal this law and ensure that no future president can weaponize it against pro-lifers ever again,” he added. “No more excuses, let’s get it done.”
The government vs. life
In July, a young mother named Bevelyn Beatty Williams was sentenced to three years and five months in prison for violating the FACE Act by protesting outside an abortion facility in June 2020.
In May, 75-year-old Paulette Harlow was sentenced to two years in prison for violating the FACE Act by participating in a 2020 protest at an abortion center in Washington, DC. After the sentencing, federal judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly taunted the grandmother who suffers from health issues. The judge told her to “make an effort to remain alive” in prison because that is a “tenet of [Harlow’s] religion.”
Harlow was one of 11 others who were recently sentenced to prison for protesting at an abortion center. Her co-defendant, Lauren Handy, was sentenced to nearly five years in prison and three years of supervised release.
That same month, the DOJ brought a lawsuit against seven pro-life taxpayers and their organizations, Red Rose Rescue and Citizens for a Pro-Life Society. The complaint accused the defendants of violating the FACE Act.
Cal Zastrow is another victim of the FACE Act who was sentenced last year to six months in prison. He was one of 11 protesters charged with violating the FACE Act by protesting at the Carafem Health Center Clinic in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, on March 5, 2021. They reportedly sang hymns, prayed, and, at one point, blocked the doorway. No one was injured.
During his sentencing hearing, Zastrow declared that “children are a blessing from God” and read passages from the Bible. Judge Aleta Trauger made it known she was not impressed by Zastrow’s “religious fervor” and said she did not need a sermon.
Violent raids
Taxpayers charged with the FACE Act have been subjected to horrifying raids from the FBI, similar to those visited on the January 6th hostages.
Last month, Tennessee father Paul Vaughn described to Congress how the FBI violently raided his home and family over his protest of abortion.
My house was assaulted, my wife and children were terrorized, and I was kidnapped at gunpoint by four armed men,” Vaughn recounted to the House Judiciary Committee on the Constitution and Limited Government on Wednesday. “I had just sent three of my children to the car so I could take them to school when the house began to shake from a loud banging near the front door. I heard men shouting from my front porch, ‘Open up! FBI!’”
He opened his curtains to see three agents with guns trained on the door. The agents did not identify themselves, he said.
“I later learned at the same time three of my children, ages 12, 14, and 18, were being detained in the side yard on the edge of the woods by a fourth armed man,” continued Vaughn, a father of 11 children. “I was taken without the presentation of a warrant or identification when requested. Make no mistake: this was an armed conflict and I was unarmed. Lethal force was abused to abridge my God-given and constitutionally secured rights.”
Vaughn, who was sentenced to three years probation, was not the only victim of a violent blitzkrieg. On an early September morning in 2022, armed FBI agents stormed the home of Mark Houck, a father of seven, who was also accused of violating the FACE Act by protesting abortion.
“The FACE Act was ostensibly passed because of violence. But as my family knows very well, all it did was give violence the cover of law and place it in the hands of the government,” Vaughn said in his testimony, adding that the FACE Act was passed to “stifle free speech and abuse the rights of Christian conservatives.”
