The Biden Justice Department has weaponized the law to attack pro-lifers who demonstrate outside abortion clinics and has also used a little-known law designed to protect the rights of newly enfranchised former American slaves to extend prison sentences.
One weapon is the pro-abortion “Free Access to Clinic Entrances Act,” a Clinton-era law that punishes pro-lifers for blocking access to slaughterhouses where unborn babies are killed.
The second is the 1870s Conspiracy Against Rights Act, which protected the voting rights of former slaves.
According to data shared with the Daily Caller by Republican Representative Chip Roy of Texas, the Biden Justice Department has “imposed more than a quarter of the charges in the law, most of which came with the new sentence enhancements.”
In other words, the abortion fanatics in the Biden Justice Department are targeting pro-lifers, and left-wing pro-abortion judges are helping them put old women in prison.
History of the FACE lawsuits
Until the fervently pro-abortion Biden administration took office, “the punishment was not as severe” for threatening to harm or kill abortion clinic butchers or their accomplices.
That's not the case for Biden. “Older women who peacefully protest against abortion clinics have faced far harsher consequences,” reported the Daily Caller. But when abortion fanatics launched a wave of terrorist attacks after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the unconstitutional 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and legalized abortion, “hundreds of attacks were carried out against pro-life pregnancy centers and churches, yet the Justice Department has only prosecuted five people for such crimes.”
According to Roy's data, the Department of Justice sued 205 pro-lifers between 1994 and 2024. The FACE Act is supposed to protect pro-life resource centers and churches, but only six charges were brought against pro-abortion or Christian-hating activists. “Charges against pro-life individuals account for approximately 97 percent of all FACE Act cases,” the website reports.
But Biden's Justice Department is particularly obsessed.
At least 55 of these cases were prosecuted during the Biden administration, but only five of them involved attacks on pregnancy support centers. In less than four years, Biden's Justice Department has filed more than a quarter of FACE-related prosecutions and about 24 percent of cases targeting pro-life activists, according to the data.
Erin Hawley, deputy director of the Center for Life and Regulatory Practice at the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), told the Daily Caller that “FACE has been politicized and misused to target peaceful pro-lifers,” while activists who “violently attacked pro-life clinics” have been left alone.
She explained that the Justice Department has charged at least 26 pro-lifers in 2022, but zero activists who “disrupted or vandalized pregnancy care centers.”
The Daily Caller also published data on pro-abortion terrorist attacks again after the leak of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe.
Based on information from pro-abortion perpetrators, news reports and documents, Catholic Vote calculated that they had attacked approximately 90 pro-life organizations and pregnancy support centers, the site continued. Extremist groups like Jane's Revenge and Ruth St. Ass were responsible for “many” of these attacks. Anti-Catholic pro-abortion elements have also attacked churches 400 times since May 2020.
In fact, according to 2022 data from the Crime Prevention Center (CPC), “pro-life groups experience more than 22 times more violence than pro-choice groups,” the Daily Caller reports.
The CPC identified 135 attacks on pro-life organizations from the date of the Supreme Court leak through Sept. 24, 2022. Only six incidents involved pro-choice organizations. The CPC said the NAF's 2021 report did not provide a list of incidents to support the data.
Strengthen your writing
These data aside, the real concern is that Biden is weaponizing the Department of Justice to persecute pro-lifers, particularly by using the Conspiracy Against Rights statute to strengthen FACE Act penalties.
The FACE Act punishes anyone who “willfully injures, intimidates, or attempts to interfere, or attempts to injure, intimidate, or interfere, by force, threat of force, or physical interference, with any person because he or she is receiving or has received reproductive health services, or because such person, or any other person, or any class of persons, is receiving or has not received reproductive health services.”
The law also punishes anyone who “intentionally injures, intimidates, interferes, or attempts to injure, intimidate, or interfere by force, threat of force, or physical obstruction, with any person lawfully exercising or attempting to exercise his or her First Amendment religious freedom right in a place of religious worship.”
The CAR law imposes fines for “two or more persons conspiring together to injure, oppress, threaten or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Union, Possession or District who is free to exercise or enjoy any right or privilege guaranteed by the Constitution or by law.”
Steve Crumpton, an attorney for the Thomas More Society, said on its website that the Biden Justice Department is “twisting” a 154-year-old law to attack pro-lifers who are lawfully protesting.
The website reported that Judge Colleen Koller Kotelly of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is sentencing pro-lifers like the Bolshevik judges who sentenced defeatists and refuseniks in Stalinist show trials.
She has sentenced at least nine defendants during Biden's presidency, each time handing down harsher sentences.
According to a Department of Justice press release, the protesters each face up to 11 years in prison, three years of probation, and fines of up to $350,000.
One of the protesters at the clinic was a 75-year-old woman, Paulette “Paula” Harlow. Judge Coller Kotelly sentenced her to 24 months in prison for violating the FACE and Conspiracy Against Rights Act by taking part in the protest. … Another defendant, Lauren Handy, was sentenced to nearly five years in prison.
Harlow's husband expressed concerns about his wife's health to the judge, who told her she should try to “stay alive” because it was “the tenet of her religion,” according to Live Action.
Another example of cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Constitution is the 2022 protests at an abortion clinic in Tennessee.
The 11 defendants, including Paul Vaughn, who was the subject of the FBI's brutal investigation, face more than 20 years in prison, a fine of about $260,000, followed by three years of probation, the website reported.
Vaughn ultimately avoided prison, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. Crumpton said Vaughn is now a convicted felon whose voting and firearms rights have been stripped away. He must follow the directions of his probation officer and is also under house arrest.
But a few years ago, pro-lifers who committed more serious FACE crimes received only probation.
In another example of bias, as The New American reported last year, the Biden Justice Department declined to prosecute pro-abortion insurrectionists who threatened Supreme Court justices in their homes.
Under a Harris administration, the Department of Justice is likely to step up legal enforcement against pro-life activists.
