The Department of Justice has ramped up its pursuit of activists who target abortion clinics during the Biden administration.
Prosecutions under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act have multiplied since President Joe Biden took office, and while the law was written to protect those on both sides of the abortion debate, the DOJ has leveled FACE Act charges against abortion opponents in nearly every instance in which it has invoked the law.
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Abortion clinics and anti-abortion facilities have been subjected to Molotov cocktails, smashed windows, threatening messages, and more in recent years. The pro-abortion National Abortion Federation and the anti-abortion Family Research Council have reported upticks in these types of attacks amid the Supreme Court’s landmark decision last year in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
The spikes in aggression coincide with the DOJ bringing at least 15 criminal cases under the FACE Act involving approximately 46 anti-abortion defendants since January 2021, according to federal data and court records. The victims in all but one of those cases were on the pro-abortion side.
The Trump administration’s DOJ brought five single-defendant criminal cases under the FACE Act, according to the same data.
The law, passed in 1994, makes it a federal crime to physically obstruct, injure, or intimidate those who are giving or receiving “reproductive health services,” which include services related to pregnancy and abortion.
It also makes damaging the property of abortion clinics, pregnancy resource centers, and churches illegal.
But critics say the Biden administration has selectively applied the law to anti-abortion advocates and failed to respond adequately to dozens of attacks by pro-abortion advocates on reproductive facilities that offer alternatives to the procedure.
Biden’s DOJ has secured numerous FACE Act convictions.
A man in California carried out nearly a dozen pellet gun ambushes on a Pasadena Planned Parenthood in 2021, resulting in repeated damage to the facility. No one was injured in the attacks. The man pleaded guilty to two felonies, including a FACE Act charge, and was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison.
Christopher Moscinski, a Franciscan friar also known as Father Fidelis Moscinski, temporarily shut down a Long Island Planned Parenthood in July 2022 by chaining bike locks and padlocks to its entrances. When authorities sawed the main gate’s lock open, Moscinski laid down in front of the gate, preventing cars from entering the property.
“At least I slowed them down some. … I slowed them down a little bit today,” Moscinski said as police arrested him, according to court documents.
Moscinski, who had prior convictions for similar conduct, pleaded not guilty but was convicted of one FACE Act charge in a bench trial this year and sentenced to six months in prison.
Some more controversial cases have, however, gained national prominence.
Anti-abortion activist Lauren Handy, who police discovered last year had five aborted fetuses in her apartment, led nine others to force their way into a Washington, D.C., abortion clinic in 2020 and form a blockade with chains, locks, and their bodies. One nurse stumbled and sprained her ankle as a result of the incident.
The defendants traveled from outside states and ranged from 25 to 75 years old.
One defendant in the case pleaded guilty to a FACE Act charge and received 10 months in prison.
The remaining nine, including Handy, were convicted of FACE Act and conspiracy charges in trials and are awaiting their sentencing. They face up to 11 years in prison and $250,000 in fines.
Handy said she was protesting the clinic of Dr. Cesare Santangelo, an abortionist the advocacy group Live Action recorded during an undercover operation as saying he “would not help” a baby in the rare event the baby was born alive during a late-term abortion procedure.
Separately, a case against abortion opponent Mark Houck, a Catholic father of seven, captured national attention after the DOJ charged him with violating the FACE Act and a jury later roundly rejected the charges, unanimously finding Houck innocent in a one-hour deliberation process.
Houck had been standing at the opposite end of the block from the entrance of a Philadelphia Planned Parenthood in October 2021 with his then-12-year-old son for “sidewalk counseling,” during which he would meet with distraught pregnant women.
A facility volunteer left the Planned Parenthood entrance and approached Houck multiple times. Houck said that during the confrontations, the man used harassing and vulgar language directed at his son, prompting Houck to tell the man to walk away. When the man persisted, Houck pushed him away, leading the man to fall to the ground. Surveillance footage corroborated Houck’s account of the incident.
While the DOJ’s charges alone raised eyebrows among abortion opponents, the heavy-handed nature of his arrest also sparked outrage, as Houck had no criminal past and no history of noncompliance with law enforcement.
The FBI and local officers made a show of force when executing the arrest warrant for Houck one morning nearly a year after the incident occurred. Armed agents surrounded Houck’s house and, according to Houck, pointed guns at him in front of his wife and young children during the process.
Attorney Roger Severino, who worked as a trial lawyer in the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division from 2008 to 2015, said during an interview that the DOJ lost in Houck’s case because of the department’s “overreach.”
“They don’t want to get to the truth,” Severino said. “They want to send a message, post-Dobbs, that abortion is their most important value and anybody that opposes it needs to get out of the way or face some form of prosecution one way or another.”
He observed that the department was “going after grandmothers and fathers” while “turning a complete blind eye to the dozens of church vandalisms and church burnings in the wake of Dobbs.”
They “moved heaven and earth to find J6 people,” Severino added, in reference to the more than 1,200 people who have been charged over the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
He said that while the DOJ has prosecutorial discretion, he believes the department has “absolutely abused” that.
The FBI said this year it could investigate pro-abortion activists under FACE Act charges, domestic violent extremism, or other violent crime charges, depending on the offenses in question.
The bureau offered $25,000 rewards for information on some of the attacks on nonprofit groups that oppose abortion. The rewards related to a series of incidents that occurred shortly after the Dobbs decision, including anonymous offenders tagging a Colorado counseling center with threatening graffiti that read, “If abortions aren’t safe, neither are you,” and throwing a small firebomb at an Oregon Right to Life building.
Some Republican lawmakers have been incensed by what they see as the Biden administration’s one-sided use of FACE Act prosecutions, and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) are among those pushing to repeal it.
Tom McClusky, CatholicVote director of government affairs, believes the law is unconstitutional and has been urging Congress to repeal it for roughly two decades. He noted other laws already exist to prosecute people for offenses like trespassing, vandalism, and assault.
He, like Severino, said he found it “remarkable” that the DOJ has, in his view, lacked the urgency to look into the destruction and vandalism of anti-abortion facilities and churches and argued that the department would typically pursue attacks of that nature with vigor if they were targeted at any other demographic.
“The Biden administration and the Democratic Party have been trying to pursue any avenue, and in many cases law-be-damned, to show that they’re defending abortion and not defending the life issue,” McClusky said.
Attorney General Merrick Garland has made FACE Act enforcement a priority, and Severino and McClusky said they believe he has unequivocally been the most aggressive with it.
The DOJ notes on its website that its enforcement of the law is “not about abortions” and that it “protects all patients, providers, and facilities that provide reproductive health services, including pro-life pregnancy counseling services.”
Garland emphasized this point in March when confronted by Lee about how the DOJ’s prosecutions were heavily lopsided in favor of pro-abortion advocates, but the attorney general contended that the attacks on abortion providers were merely easier cases to prosecute.
“I will say you are quite right,” Garland said. “There are many more prosecutions with respect to the blocking of the abortion centers, but that is generally because those actions are taken with photography at the time, during the daylight, and seeing the person who did it is quite easy.”
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The attorney general explained that “those who are attacking the pregnancy resource centers, which is a horrid thing to do, are doing this at night, in the dark. We have put full resources on this. We have put rewards out for this. The Justice Department and the FBI have made outreach to Catholic and other organizations to ask for their help in identifying the people who are doing this.”
He added, “We will prosecute every case against a pregnancy resource center that we can make.”
