The Biden Justice Department has weaponized the law to attack pro-lifers who demonstrated outside abortion clinics. And it’s using an obscure law meant to protect the rights of newly enfranchised former American slaves to lengthen prison sentences.
One weapon is the pro-abortion Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, a Clinton-era law that punishes pro-lifers for supposedly blocking access to the abattoirs where the unborn are murdered.
The second is 1870’s Conspiracy Against Rights law that protected the right to vote of former slaves.
Data released to the Daily Caller by GOP Texas Representative Chip Roy show that the Biden DOJ has “has levied over a quarter of the law’s total charges, most of which have carried this novel sentence enhancement.”
In other words, the abortion fanatics in Biden’s DOJ are targeting pro-lifers. And leftist pro-abortion judges are helping them put little old ladies behind bars.
History of FACE Prosecutions
Until the fanatically pro-abortion Biden administration took office, even threats to harm or murder an abortion-clinic butcher or his accomplices “carried less severe punishments.”
Not so with Biden. “Elderly women peacefully protesting an abortion clinic have faced much harsher consequences,” the Daily Caller reported. But when abortion fanatics began a wave of terror attacks after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned 1973s unconstitutional Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion, “hundreds of attacks were waged against pro-life pregnancy centers and churches, but the DOJ has only prosecuted five individuals for such offense.”
Roy’s data show that between 1994 and 2024 DOJ filed charges against 205 pro-lifers. Though the FACE Act is supposed to protect pro-life resource centers and churches, just six charges were filed against pro-aborts and Christophobes. “Prosecutions of pro-life individuals constitute roughly 97% of all FACE Act cases,” the website reported.
But Biden’s DOJ has been particularly obsessed:
At least 55 of those cases were prosecuted during the Biden administration, only five of which involved attacks on pregnancy resource centers. In less than four years, Biden’s DOJ has accounted for over a quarter of all FACE prosecutions and approximately 24% of cases targeting pro-life activists, the data demonstrates. …
FACE “has been politicized and abused to target peaceful pro-life advocates,” while activists “who violently attacked” pro-life clinics walk free, Erin Hawley, Vice President of the Center for Life and Regulatory Practice at the Alliance for Defending Freedom (ADF), told the Daily Caller.
She explained how the DOJ prosecuted at least 26 pro-life individuals in 2022 but zero activists “who obstructed or vandalized pregnancy care centers.”
The Daily Caller also included data about pro-abort terror attacks, again, after the leak of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe.
Using tips, news reports, and material from pro-abortion perpetrators, Catholic Vote calculated that they attacked some 90 pro-life organizations or pregnancy resource centers, the website continued. The extremist Jane’s Revenge and Ruth Sent Us are linked to “many” of those attacks. And anti-Catholic pro-aborts have attacked churches 400 times since May 2020.
Indeed, 2022 data from the The Crime Prevention Center (CPC) “showed pro-life groups experienced over 22 times more violence than pro-choice organizations,” the Daily Caller reported:
CPC identified 135 attacks on pro-life groups from the date of the Supreme Court leak to September 24, 2022. There were only six cases concerning pro-choice groups. CPC said NAF’s 2021 report failed to provide a list of cases to substantiate the data.”
Enhancing Sentences
Those data aside, the real concern is Biden’s weaponizing DOJ to persecute pro-lifers, notably by using the Conspiracy Against Rights Statute to enhance FACE Act penalties.
The FACE Act punishes anyone who “by force or threat of force or by physical obstruction, intentionally injures, intimidates or interferes with or attempts to injure, intimidate or interfere with any person because that person is or has been, or in order to intimidate such person or any other person or any class of persons from, obtaining or providing reproductive health services.”
As well, it punishes anyone who “by force or threat of force or by physical obstruction, intentionally injures, intimidates or interferes with or attempts to injure, intimidate or interfere with any person lawfully exercising or seeking to exercise the First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship.”
The CAR law fines any “two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”
Steve Crampton, a lawyer with the Thomas More Society, told the website that Biden’s DOJ has “twisted” the 154-year-old law to attack pro-lifers who are protesting legally.
The website reported that Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who sits on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, sentences pro-lifers like a Bolshevik judge in a Stalinist show trial sentenced defeatists and refuseniks:
She has sentenced at least nine defendants during Biden’s presidency, each time delivering severe punishments.…
Each protester faced up to 11 years in prison, three years of supervised release and fines of up to $350,000, according to a DOJ press release.…
One demonstrator at the clinic was a 75 year-old woman, Paulette “Paula” Harlow. Kollar-Kotelly sentenced her to 24 months in prison for allegedly violating FACE and the Conspiracy Against Rights law by attending the demonstration.… Another defendant, Lauren Handy, was sentenced to almost five years in prison.
Harlow’s husband expressed concerns about his wife’s health to the judge. The judge told Harlow that she should try to “remain alive” because it’s a “tenet of [her] religion,” according to LiveAction.
Another example of constitutionally-forbidden cruel and unusual punishment involved a protest at an abortion clinic in Tennessee in 2022.
The 11 defendants, including Paul Vaughn, the subject of an outrageous FBI raid, faced more than two decades in prison, some $260,000 in fines, and then three years of supervised released, the website reported:
Vaughn ultimately escaped prison time, but it was a pyrrhic victory. Vaughn is now a convicted felon stripped of his right to vote and obtain a firearm, according to Crampton. He must answer to his probation officer and is also under house arrest.
Yet years ago, pro-lifers who committed more severe FACE crimes were sentenced only to probation.
In another example of bias, as The New American reported last year, the Biden DOJ refused to prosecute pro-abortion insurrectionists who threatened Supreme Court justices at their homes.
Under a Harris administration, the DOJ will likely intensify its lawfare against pro-lifers.
