There’s no doubt that the Biden administration is actively threatening Americans with prison time simply for peacefully praying and contending for unborn lives at abortion mills around the country.
By the time President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, the federal government had brought fewer than 100 prosecutions since the unconstitutional Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act’s inception in 1994.
That’s fewer than four targetings a year under a law that, as Republican Rep. Chip Roy noted in a 2023 letter, “had never been used to indict individuals related to an attack on a pro-life pregnancy center or house of worship.”
In 2022 alone, however, more than two dozen pro-lifers were persecuted by the Biden-led Department of Justice with FACE Act charges. Over the last two years, that number has only grown.
The Biden DOJ formally kicked off its campaign against Christian pro-lifers when it charged Mark Houck with violating the FACE Act after he protected his son from an angry abortion activist across the street from a Planned Parenthood in 2021. The indictment carried a maximum of up to 11 years in prison with three years of supervised release and fines totaling $350,000.
In a clear attempt “to intimidate people of faith and pro-life Americans,” the Biden administration made a showy arrest of Houck at his family home in September 2022 by deploying FBI equipped with battering rams and ballistic shields. His wife and seven children, who were present during the raid, recounted that agents “had big, huge rifles pointed at Mark and pointed at me and kind of pointed throughout the house.”
After months of legal battles, Houck was eventually cleared by a federal jury. The dozens of other pro-lifers targeted by the Biden regime, however, were not so lucky.
In an extreme expansion of the punishment time often dealt to people protecting unborn babies, prosecutors threatened Lauren Handy and several of her fellow Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (PAAU) members with up to 11 years in federal prison after they were convicted of allegedly violating the FACE Act and participating in a Conspiracy Against Rights.
In May, a U.S. district judge confirmed the 30-year-old must serve 57 months with three years of supervision for her participation in the peaceful protest of one of the most controversial abortion facilities in the nation. Paulette Harlow, one of Handy’s fellow defendants with a “debilitating medical condition,” is expected to be locked up for 24 months for activities such as staying “chained together, praying the Rosary and singing hymns to the Blessed Virgin Mary.”
Handy and her crew’s so-called crimes included initiating a “rescue and protest” at late-term abortionist Cesare Santangelo’s Washington, D.C., facility in October 2020. As Handy’s lawyers at the Thomas More Society noted, the 10 defendants “simply kneeled and prayed at Santangelo’s facility, some passed out pro-life literature and counseled abortion-minded women, and others roped and chained themselves together inside the facility.”
A similar scenario played out for FACE Act defendants like Paul Vaughn and 87-year-old Eva Edl, who “survived a communist concentration camp.” They were among the 11 pro-lifers who were raided, charged, and convicted for peacefully protesting outside of a Tennessee abortion facility.
Footage of the March 2021 event shows the group singing, reading scripture, and praying in the hallway of the building that houses the Mt. Juliet abortion facility.
Vaughn, a father of 11 who has plans to appeal his case, faces a maximum of 11 years in prison and up to $260,000 in fines, while Edl faces a maximum of one year in prison and up to $10,000 in fines.
The sudden onslaught of legal attacks on pro-lifers following the biggest win for the unborn this country has ever seen is no coincidence. While the pro-life pregnancy centers and churches that were firebombed, vandalized, and set ablaze in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision still struggle to get the justice their attackers deserve, the weaponized DOJ has fully preoccupied itself with pursuing its ideological enemies instead of the far-left instigators causing real harm.
Any attempt to treat the Biden regime’s targeting of Christians who value the sanctity of life as legitimate is partisan and tone-deaf to the reality that the federal government has weaponized itself against people whose biggest tool for change isn’t Molotov cocktails or spray paint but supplication.
