Three pro-life activists last week received their sentences in federal court after they were convicted of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act for protesting in 2021 outside of a Tennessee abortion clinic, according to the Christian news outlet World.
The three activists were charged with “conspiracy against rights,” along with being charged with violating the FACE Act, which “prohibits threats of force, obstruction and property damages intended to interfere with reproductive health care services” according to the U.S. Justice Department.
On September 27, U.S. District Judge Aleta Trauger sentenced pro-life activist Chester Gallagher to sixteen months in prison, World reported. Trauger also sentenced pro-life activist Heather Idoni to eight months in prison.
Idoni will serve her eight months “concurrently with a two-year sentence she is already serving for similar charges related to a 2020 demonstration in Washington D.C.,” according to World.
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On September 26, U.S. Magistrate Judge Jeffery S. Frensley sentenced 89-year-old pro-life activist Eva Edl to three years on probation, World reported.
Steve Crampton, a Thomas More Society attorney who represented co-defendant Calvin Vaughn – who received a sentence in July – in court described the 2021 Tennessee protest as “a peaceful demonstration by entirely peaceable citizens—filled with prayer, hymn-singing, and worship—oriented toward persuading expectant mothers not to abort their babies,” according to World.
Edl, Gallagher, Idoni, and Zastrow have also been convicted with a separate FACE Act violation charge for protesting abortion in Michigan, as CatholicVote previously reported.
Edl, who faces up to 11 years in prison for her activism in Michigan, emigrated to America with her family after surviving a Yugoslavian Communist death camp.
In early September, Edl told CatholicVote in an exclusive interview that she started protesting abortion in 1988 when she saw a group of activists sitting outside an abortion clinic in Georgia. Before then she did not know that abortions occurred in America.
“People should have done that for me when I was being shipped into a death camp to be exterminated,” Edl stated. “These babies are just shipped in a different way. So that’s when I rescued for the first time.”
LifeNews Note: Grace Porto writes for CatholicVote, where this column originally appeared.
