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By Teresa Cisneros Burton and Ava Slocum | Twenty-three antiabortion extremists convicted of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE Act) were pardoned by President Donald Trump on Thursday. The pardons place extremists responsible for invading and blockading reproductive healthcare clinics in dozens of states back on the street, inviting more violence and chaos against patients and abortion providers.
On Friday, the day of the antiabortion March for Life rally in D.C., Trump’s new Justice Department also issued an order stopping prosecutions of people blocking access to reproductive healthcare facilities. According to Justice Department chief of staff Chad Mizelle, prosecutions and civil actions under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act or FACE Act will now be allowed only in “extraordinary circumstances.” Mizelle also ordered the dismissal of three ongoing FACE Act cases related to attacks on clinics in Tennessee, Pennsylvania and Ohio in 2021 where antiabortion protestors threatened patients and blocked their access to the clinics.
While right-wing extremists refer to these criminal defendants as “peaceful pro-life Americans … deserving of full and unconditional pardons,” abortion advocates know them for their history as leaders of campaigns of terror and for orchestrating dangerous invasions of healthcare clinics in dozens of states. The 23 individuals whom Trump pardoned on Thursday had previously been convicted in historic federal prosecutions.
The pardons benefit defendants of dangerous clinic invasions, such as that at the 2020 Washington, D.C., Surgi-Clinic. Unlike the propaganda delivered by right-wing media outlets of the defendants as “peaceful protestors,” duVergne Gaines, director of the Feminist Majority Foundation’s National Clinic Access Project, says that footage of the 2020 clinic invasion “depicted women desperate for care and in medically fragile situations, including fainting in the hallway, being terrorized and traumatized by extremists.”
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