In one of his first actions in his second term, President Donald Trump pardoned nearly two dozen anti-abortion activists who had been sentenced to prison for blocking access to abortion clinics, in some cases assaulting patients and staff in the process. On the same day, his Justice Department issued new guidances to scale back protections for clinics—effectively encouraging anti-abortion activists to escalate their harassment and attacks.
Since then, anti-abortion activists—including those Trump personally freed from prison last month—say they’re prepared to double down on harassing clinics across the country that haven’t yet been shut dow by abortion bans. Politico reported on Sunday that at a recent online convening of anti-abortion activists, Herb Geraghty, a Pittsburgh-based activist who served 17 months of a 27-month prison sentence for illegally invading an abortion clinic in 2020, told his colleagues that while he was “traumatized” by prison, he’s “committed to nonviolent direct action in service of the pro-life cause.”
“There’s actual lives being saved every minute you are committing the crime. Every minute that a rescuer is inside the building, they are not killing babies,” Geraghty told the gathering. However, despite his characterization of these actions as nonviolent, physically blocking someone’s access to health care—or terrorizing and making clinic workers fear for their lives—is fundamentally violent. So, too, is equating a health service with murder and implicitly advocating for violence against the “murderers.”
One of the activists Trump pardoned, Lauren Handy, stole five aborted fetuses from an abortion clinic in 2022 and illegally kept them in her home. In May 2024, she was sentenced to about five years in prison for her coordinated attack on a Washington, D.C., clinic in 2020, alongside one of her co-defendants who assaulted a nurse (spraining the nurse’s ankle), and another who knocked a woman experiencing labor pains to the floor, then blocked her from entering the clinic. “Being able to have freedom of movement, being able to go back and advocate and rescue, and do whatever I need to do that the lord is calling me to—that’s what I’m very thankful for,” Handy told Politico.
Handy said that if it weren’t for Trump’s pardon, she would have been barred from standing within 1,000 feet of a clinic upon her release. But thanks to Trump’s pardon, she can harass people without restriction.
In January, Trump’s DOJ announced it will limit enforcement of the FACE Act (Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances), a law that was enacted in the 1990s to prohibit anti-abortion protesters from blocking entry to abortion clinics. The FACE Act passed in 1994 in response to years of extreme violence and obstruction from protesters, including the murder of Dr. David Gunn in 1993. As recently as 2009, an anti-abortion extremist killed abortion provider Dr. George Tiller in Kansas. Per the new DOJ guidance, prosecutors should only enforce the FACE Act under “extraordinary circumstances,” like incidents involving death, extreme bodily harm, or significant property damage. As Slate put it, Trump has effectively declared “open season” on abortion providers.
In addition to the anti-abortion movement’s increasingly friendly relationship with federal law enforcement, the movement is directly appealing to local police too. “If you’re a Christian police officer, a pro-life police officer, you need to commit in your heart not to arrest rescuers that are defending children, leave them be, even if it costs you your job. If you’re not willing to protect the children yourself, let us do it,” said Jonathan Darnel, who was sentenced to 34 months in prison for violently obstructing access to a D.C. clinic in 2020, told Politico.
Jason Storms, leader of the extremist, anti-abortion terror organization Operation Save America, told Politico he is leading a conference next month to train activists in the most obstructive tactics to blockade abortion clinics. Abortion “needs to be opposed, even to the point of risking arrest or severe persecution,” he said, and “dear friends” of his who have been released from prison under Trump are excited to return to harassing clinics.
In addition to the 23 anti-abortion activists Trump pardoned, he also pardoned about 1,500 Jan. 6 insurrectionists. Many of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists who also received pardons last week were known in their communities for harassing abortion clinics.
Calla Halle, executive director of A Preferred Women’s Health Center, which is based in Georgia and North Carolina, told Politico that protests targeting her clinics have already escalated since the pardons and new guidance. “Protesters seem to know that they’re not going to be held accountable,” she said. There’s been “a lot more boundary-pushing” in recent weeks, with multiple incidents of activists trespassing on her clinics or posing as patients to break into her clinic’s administrative office. “The lying, the harassment, the intimidation, it’s definitely amping up. There’s less of a deterrent for protesters.” Halle said that last month, the FBI informed her it’s handing off an ongoing investigation of a bomb threat against her clinic from July to state authorities. But state authorities have yet to contact her.
In a statement shared with Jezebel in January, Center for Reproductive Rights President Nancy Northrup called Trump’s pardons of anti-abortion activists a “get-out-of-jail-free card inviting anti-abortion extremists to step up their attacks on reproductive health clinics with impunity.” But such attacks are already increasing: The National Abortion Federation reported that in 2022—the year that Roe v. Wade was overturned—clinics across the country saw a 538% increase in people obstructing clinic entrances (from 45 in 2021 to 287 in 2022); a 913% increase in stalking of clinic staff (from 8 in 2021 to 81 in 22); and a 144% increase in bomb threats.
All of this may soon get worse. “Even with [the FACE Act] in place, anti-abortion activists have threatened to kill providers, have bombed their clinics, and have harassed their patients,” Northrup said last month. “With these pardons, President Trump has left patients and providers to fend for themselves against those who will go to extremes to stop women from accessing healthcare.”
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