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If an unjust law is no law at all, as Martin Luther King Jr. once stated, then a law that is unequally applied is also no law — it is instead a cruel weapon.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) has filed suit against two pro-life organizations and seven individuals who participated in rescue missions aimed at saving preborn lives at abortion clinics, the latest in a focused effort to punish peaceful pro-lifers while largely ignoring the aggression and violence of pro-abortion activists.
Filed in a federal district court in Ohio on May 20, the lawsuit seeks “compensatory damages, monetary penalties and injunctive relief” from Citizens for a Pro-Life Society, Red Rose Rescue, and seven pro-life protesters: Laura Gies, Lauren Handy, Clara McDonald, Monica Miller, Christopher Moscinski, Jay Smith, and Audrey Whipple for alleged violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act at two clinics in Ohio in June 2021.
Handy was recently sentenced to 57 months in prison for violating the FACE Act at a protest of a Washington D.C. abortion clinic in October 2020. She was initially arrested by the FBI after a delivery driver gave her and a fellow pro-lifer a box with the remains of 115 fetuses, including five late-term babies who appeared to have been killed in illegal abortions, and she reported it to the D.C. police and asked them to conduct an investigation.
Smith pled guilty to a FACE Act violation that was also in connection with the D.C. protest.
In this latest legal action, the DOJ claims that in June 2021, the defendants entered Northeast Ohio Women’s Center and handed out red roses to the women in the clinic and attempted to dissuade them from having an abortion.
When asked to leave the defendants allegedly refused to leave and either lay or knelt on the waiting room floor.
Gies is said to have told staff, “All of you staff, your paychecks are from blood money of the innocent children you’re ripping to shreds…God has a plan for your life and this is not it. Please, repent! It’s not too late to stop doing what you’re doing!”
Police arrived and the defendants arrested and forcibly removed.
The suit claims that the protest disrupted the clinic’s schedule and some patients had to reschedule their abortions.
The DOJ asserts that on the next day the defendants went to Bedford Heights Surgery Center, which is a Planned Parenthood facility, and began approaching women in their cars and talking to them in the parking lot.
Smith allegedly entered the clinic and started passing out brochures to patients. According to the suit, Smith refused to leave and was eventually forced out by an employee of the clinic.
Handy is accused of laying in front of the door to the clinic and refusing to move until being carried away by police officers.
Defendants continued to enter the clinic, and the suit claims that patients there were also forced to reschedule.
The DOJ quotes Moscinski and Miller in the lawsuit as saying that the purpose of the protests is to draw police attention and interrupt the functions of the clinic so they stop their “killing business.”
The accusations are consistent with Red Rose Rescue’s outlined methods, but they are also clear that they do not engage in violence or resist arrest nor do they argue, yell, or use profanity to make their point. They explain that “The ministry flows from and is strengthened by prayer and laboring in love to save the most vulnerable among us.” While at the clinic, they “peacefully talk to women scheduled for abortion, with the goal of persuading them to choose life” and “offer to them red roses as a sign of life, peace and love.”
Red Rose Rescue instructs protesters not to leave and to be arrested. Once arrested the protesters are told not to plead guilty or no contest, but rather to be incarcerated as a witness to the killing of the unborn and to serve those in prison.
Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division noted in a press release, “Obstructing people from accessing reproductive health care and physically obstructing providers from offering it are unlawful.”
She continued, “Congress passed the FACE Act 30 years ago this month in response to acts of violence, threats of violence and physical obstruction at reproductive health clinics in our country. The Civil Rights Division is committed to enforcing federal law to protect the rights of those who seek and those who provide access to reproductive health services.”
U.S. Attorney Rebecca C. Lutzko for the Northern District of Ohio stated, “Federal and state laws protect access to reproductive health care services. Individuals have the right to access facilities in Ohio to make decisions about their own bodies, health and futures, in consultation with health care providers, free from force, threats of force, intimidation or physical obstruction.”
Critics claim that the DOJ is not committed to enforcing the FACE Act equally. They say that the FACE Act has been weaponized against pro-life protesters, but is rarely used against pro-abortion activists, who since 2022 have attacked hundreds of churches and crisis pregnancy centers and even threatened to shoot pro-lifers.
Florida Rep. John Rutherford, R, has since sent a letter, signed by eight other members of the House of Representatives, to Attorney General Merrick Garland accusing the DOJ of failing to enforce the FACE Act when it comes to pro-life organizations and churches.
One example they cited occurred during Sunday mass earlier this year, when three anti-Israel protesters disrupted an Easter Saturday Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral by rushing the altar, chanting “Free Palestine,” and holding up a banner that stated, “Silence = Death.” The protesters were arrested by New York City police but soon released; they have yet to be charged with FACE Act violations.
The letter states,
“Since the leak of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health in 2022, over 150 attacks on churches and pregnancy resource centers have occurred across the country.
While the DOJ actively prosecutes individuals who protest outside abortion clinics, your agency has failed to prosecute a single act of violence against places of religious worship and has only prosecuted five cases under the FACE Act for attacks on pro-life reproductive health facilities. This unequal application of the law shows a clear double standard that ignores FACE Act violations by activists at churches and pro-life reproductive health facilities and decidedly targets violators at pro-abortion facilities.”
The representatives demanded answers to the following four questions:
Is the FACE Act being applied unequally against pro-lifers? Let’s consider the facts.
There have been nearly 100 attacks on pro-life centers and groups by pro-abortion activists since May 2022, when the Dobbs decision was leaked, and over 400 attacks on churches since May 2020. And yet the DOJ has indicted a very few of those perpetrators for threats and acts of destruction and violence; even fewer have been charged with violations of the FACE Act.
One of those, Whitney Durant, who vandalized a pregnancy center with various phrases, including “Abort God,” “LIARS,” “FAKE CLINIC,” and “Jane’s Revenge,” was allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor and sentenced to probation and a small fine.
Meanwhile, Hridindu Roychowdhury, a member of Antifa and Jane’s Revenge who the DOJ has labeled a domestic terrorist, was charged with arson after throwing Molotov cocktails into Wisconsin Family Action, a pro-life organization, and sentenced to 7.5 years. Just for context, Lauren Handy, who was labeled the conspiratorial ringleader of what was effectively a peaceful sit-in protest, has now been officially sentenced to a prison term of nearly 5 years.
Moreover, Handy and the other pro-lifers convicted of the Washington D.C. clinic protests, including two women in their 70s, one of whom has health issues, were imprisoned immediately while awaiting sentencing because they had committed a “crime of violence.”
In Tennessee, several other pro-lifers were charged with and convicted of both FACE Act violations and conspiracy and are facing up to 11 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Meanwhile, the FBI has made no headway determining who is behind Jane’s Revenge, the domestic terrorist group that says it has members and allies across the country and claimed responsibility for most of the pro-life and church attacks, including firebombing three crisis pregnancy centers, in addition to Wisconsin Family Action. In a manifesto released in June 2022, the group’s leaders bragged about “how fun and easy it is to attack” and called for “open season” on “anti-choice” providers and supporters that refuse to shut down — a threat it then ramped up in the summer of 2022 and has repeatedly carried out in the years since.
Ironically, since the Supreme Court has ruled that there is no constitutional right to an abortion, the FACE Act is safeguarding a practice that isn’t even legal in many states. But that’s why the DOJ is now going back in time and litigating protests they largely ignored before Roe fell. Now, suddenly, these peaceful protesters, many of them grandmothers in their 70s and 80s, are seen as so “dangerous” and “violent” that they have to be jailed immediately.
So yes, the FBI is clearly applying the FACE Act unequally, but even worse, it is intentionally weaponizing it against pro-lifers in order to protect abortion clinics.
With the states now in charge of abortion laws, the DOJ is using the FACE Act in a way that’s meant to intimidate others pro-lifers so they stop protesting or even speaking out about abortion.
One need only look at the way the FBI arrested pro-lifers Mark Houck and Paul Vaughan during early morning raids on their homes and in front of their young children to recognize that this is not business as usual.
Moreover, the DOJ has yet to bring conspiracy charges against those climate change or pro-Hamas protesters who run “international economic blockades” that physically impede roads, bridges, tunnels, and other critical infrastructure, a tactic that blocks thousands of regular people from reaching their destination, which could be their job, home, the hospital, a funeral, or even possibly, an abortion clinic.
Martin Luther King Jr. once said that an unjust law is no law at all. Likewise, a law that is unequally applied is also no law — it is a cruel weapon.
That the DOJ believes anyone speaking up and engaging in peaceful sit-in protests deserves to be thrown in jail for years or to be harassed and fined into oblivion — even while turning a blind eye to violent domestic terrorists and aggressive protesters — says a lot more about the federal government’s willingness to use power and oppressive force to make its point than it does any of the pro-lifers it’s now targeting.
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