Trump Pardons Are Reinvigorating Anti-Abortion Extremists’ Plans to Harass Doctors & Patients
One abortion clinic director told Politico that "intimidation" is already "amping up" because "there’s less of a deterrent for protesters under Trump."
Photo: Getty AbortionPolitics
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.