President Trump issued pardons Thursday for nearly two dozen anti-abortion activists who had been convicted of blockading abortion clinic entrances.
“They should not have been prosecuted. Many of them are elderly people,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “This is a great honor to sign this.”
Anti-abortion groups and GOP lawmakers have been pressing Trump to pardon the protesters charged with violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which makes it a federal crime to use “threats of force, obstruction or inflict property damage intended to interfere with reproductive health care services.”
“They have been heartened during their imprisonment and unjust prosecutions by your repeated messages to them during your campaign, urging them to persevere until you were able to take office, review their cases, and free them,” the Thomas More Society wrote in a January letter to Trump.
Trump’s pardons included a group convicted of a 2020 planned blockade of a District of Columbia-area abortion clinic. Protesters bound themselves with chains and locks and physically obstructed clinic staff and patients during the blockade, which was livestreamed on social media.
The FACE Act was passed in 1994 amid a rise of blockades and violent acts against reproductive health care facilities and patients, most notably the murder of David Gunn in Florida and the attempted murder of George Tiller in Kansas.
Some GOP lawmakers have called for repealing the law, claiming it has been used disproportionately against anti-abortion protesters, who were being unfairly targeted.
“We thank President Trump for immediately delivering on his promise to free pro-life protesters who [were] targeted and imprisoned by Biden’s Department of Justice,” Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser said in a statement. “There is no question these prosecutions were political.”
On a website explaining the law, former President Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) said the FACE Act “is not about abortions.”
“The statute protects all patients, providers, and facilities that provide reproductive health services, including pro-life pregnancy counseling services and any other pregnancy support facility providing reproductive health care,” the DOJ said.
Most recently, the DOJ charged four people for their 2022 targeted attacks on anti-abortion pregnancy resource centers in Florida.
The announcement of the pardons comes ahead of Friday’s annual March for Life anti-abortion protest. Trump is expected to address the crowd in a video.
