Republicans Target Law DOJ Used To Imprison Pro-Lifers

Republicans trying to reinvigorate a bill to repeal the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act held a congressional hearing Wednesday highlighting how the Department of Justice (DOJ) has weaponized FACE against pro-lifers.

Some pro-lifers will spend this Christmas in federal prison because they peacefully prayed or briefly blocked the doors to abortion mills around the country. Under President Joe Biden’s direction, the DOJ cracked down on such pro-lifers using the 1994 FACE Act, coupled with a rarely used conspiracy charge that added a decade to their potential sentence.

Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, introduced HR 5577, a measure to repeal the FACE Act, in Sept. 2023, but there was not enough political will in the House to move the bill forward. With Republicans in the majority in 2025, it is more likely to pass.

“The FACE Act has been the law of the land for the last [30]  years, and the Biden DOJ in just four years has brought over a quarter of all FACE Act prosecutions,” Rep. Wesley Hunt, R-Texas said during Wednesday’s hearing in the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government.

Federalist reporter Jordan Boyd previously reported about how the FBI has targeted pro-lifers.

Hunt talked about a 2021 incident at a now closed Mount Juliet, Tennessee, abortion mill.

“Pro-life advocates were arrested for singing and praying in a hallway of a shared general medical office building featuring an abortion clinic,” Hunt said. “They initially were faced with misdemeanor charges, but magically, 17 months later, the DOJ charged these Christians with federal crimes. Among these charged was Eva Edl, now 89 years old. She’s a survivor of a communist concentration camp in Yugoslavia after World War II. That’s right, in Biden’s America, you can escape a communist concentration camp and then come to America and be arrested for praying.”

Since the start of the Biden Harris administration, Roy said in his opening statement, through May 2024, the DOJ has brought a total of 24 FACE Act cases against 55 defendants, with only two of those cases related to attacks on pregnancy resource centers. Roy said in his opening statement.

“To this day, the FACE Act has never been used in defense of the church since it was passed,” Roy said. “And when the DOJ does prosecute pro-abortion activists, the vigor with which they pursued and penalized these individuals pales in comparison to the penalties faced by pro-life advocates.”

Paul Vaughn, a Tennessee man who was at the 2021 incident Hunt mentioned, was arrested by the FBI at gunpoint, in his home, 17 months later. Now he is on house arrest for the incident, but others who participated are serving prison terms. 

As I previously reported for The Federalist, for Vaughn to testify at the hearing, he had to engage an attorney and get the permission of his parole officer, the judge, and four people within the DOJ.

“There’s a lot of talk about violence around the issue of abortion. Of course, all people of honor and character denounce acts of violence on either side of this issue, but the narrative has been projected against the pro-life people, and fails to take into account at least three other aspects of violence around this issue,” Vaughn said in his testimony. “There is violence committed against every unborn child in every abortion. There is violence committed by aggravated fathers or other family members of aborted children, and there is violence being done to pro-lifers by our own government. Any serious conversation about violence going forward, needs to include these three facts. The FACE Act was ostensibly passed because of violence, but as my family knows very well, all they did was give violence the cover of law and place it in the hands of the government.”

Senior Counsel at Thomas More Society Steve Crampton, who represented Vaughn in court, said the FACE Act should be repealed because it is an unconstitutional law and an unnecessary federal overreach into a matter best left for the states.

“I also urge this committee to take action regarding the use and abuse of the Ku Klux Klan conspiracy against rights statute passed in 1870,  which has for the first time in our nation’s history, been pressed into service for use against these peaceful protesters,” Crampton said.

But Democrats are not interested in repealing the FACE Act.

“We continue to see our GOP colleagues ignoring facts and pushing a false narrative of selective enforcement in order to form a pretext for repeal of the FACE Act,” Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, D-Penn., said, “This attack upon the FACE Act is part of a coordinated, extreme, anti-choice agenda that seeks to gut reproductive rights and effectively ban abortion care in the United States … No one deserves to be denied medical care because of someone else’s political or religious beliefs.”

Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., said strong enforcement of FACE is needed more now than ever.  

“As we stand on the eve of the next Trump administration, today’s hearing, the last for the Judiciary Committee of the 118th Congress, can only be interpreted as a message from House Republicans to these extreme anti-abortion activists,” Nadler said. “That message is, ‘Sit tight,’ because Republicans will use the 119th Congress to lay yet another brick in the groundwork for the Trump administration’s plans to use complete Republican control the federal government, to block women from obtaining the reproductive health care they need, all while inching towards enacting a total nationwide ban on abortion. House Democrats will not stay silent in the face of this onslaught. We will do everything within our power to protect the right to an abortion, and to resist Republican efforts to enact a nationwide proportion ban.”

Democrats pushed the mythical “nationwide abortion ban” as a scare tactic during election campaign events. Republicans have not sought such a ban.

Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.