A Michigan jury has found seven pro-life activists guilty of engaging in a conspiracy against rights and violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, or FACE, Act for peacefully protesting outside of an abortion clinic.
The charges against the pro-life activists were brought by President Joe Biden’s administration, specifically the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division led by Kristen Clarke. The Daily Wire reported Tuesday that the DOJ has used the conspiracy against rights charge, which was originally designed for the Ku Klux Klan, to prosecute the pro-lifers, who face 10 years in prison as well as heavy fines.
One of these pro-life activists is 89-year-old Eva Edl, who survived a World War II-era death camp before escaping to the United States. She has devoted her life to protecting unborn babies.
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“I feel very strongly, because of my background, that human life is sacred,” she told The Daily Signal in April as she discussed her looming trials. “Government does not have the authority to permit what God forbids. And murder is forbidden by God.”
The jury convicted her Tuesday with fellow pro-life activists Chester Gallagher, Heather Idoni, Joel Curry, Justin Phillips, Cal Zastrow, and Eva Zastrow, The Daily Wire reported.
The group of pro-life activists had participated in a “rescue”—an event where they peacefully protested outside of Northland Family Planning Clinic, an abortion clinic, in Sterling Heights, Michigan. Additionally, Edl and Idoni had participated in a pro-life protest at Women’s Health Clinic in Saginaw, Michigan.
The FACE Act prohibits use of force, obstruction, or property damage intended to interfere with “reproductive health care services.” Though it theoretically protects houses of worship and pro-life pregnancy resource centers as well as abortion clinics, the Biden administration’s Justice Department has largely used the FACE Act to prosecute pro-life activists like Edl.
Edl maintains that she never committed any violence against those at the abortion clinics. She says that her actions are completely justified, given that she is trying to save the lives of babies about to be aborted.
“Let me liken it to something,” Edl said, referring back to her time in the death camp, “When we were rounded up to be killed, we were placed in cattle cars, and our train was headed toward the extermination camp.”
“What if citizens of my country would have overcome their fear and a number of them stood on those railroad tracks between the gate of the entrance to the death camp and the train?” she asked. “The train would have to stop. And while the guards on those trains would be busy rounding up the ones that were in front of the train, another group could have come in, pried open our cattle car and possibly set us free. But nobody did.”
She has heard stories that people stood by the roadside and wept as the cattle cars went by. “But that didn’t help us any,” she said.
“So, when we place our bodies between the woman and the clinic, we buy time to get our sidewalk counselors the opportunity to speak with women and –hopefully open their hearts with love for their babies and let their babies live,” the death camp survivor said.
“After all,” she added, “we offer them everything there is, including adoptions. I’ve offered to adopt babies on the spot … we’re standing between the killer and the victim.”
Kristen Clarke, the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, heads up enforcement of the FACE Act. Following a report from The Daily Signal in April, Clarke recently admitted that she hid the fact that she had been arrested and her arrest’s subsequent expungement from her record from investigators when she was confirmed by the U.S. Senate to her Justice Department post.
The president’s critics have accused the Biden-Harris administration and the DOJ of weaponizing the FACE Act against pro-lifers while failing to charge pro-abortion criminals for the hundreds of attacks on pro-life pregnancy resource centers since the May 2022 leak of the draft Supreme Court opinion indicating Roe v. Wade would soon be overturned.
Some critics, among them Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, have called for the repeal of the FACE Act, arguing that it serves no purpose but to target pro-life activists.
“The Biden administration is using the FACE Act to give pro-life activists and senior citizens lengthy prison terms for nonviolent offenses and protests—all while turning a blind eye to the violence, arson, and riots conducted on behalf of ‘approved’ leftist causes,” Lee told The Daily Signal in May, when a number of pro-life activists were sentenced to prison time.
“Unequal enforcement of the law is a violation of the law,” Lee added at the time, “and men and women who try to expose the horrors of abortion are being unjustly persecuted for their motivations.”
