(The Lion) — President Donald Trump pardoned 23 peaceful pro-life protesters after a plea from Missouri Senator Josh Hawley on the floor of the Senate on Thursday.
The protesters were targeted by the Biden administration under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE), prosecutions which were characterized by Hawley as “corrupt” attacks on freedom of conscience protected by the First Amendment.
“No administration in the history of this country has assaulted these rights more deliberately, more fervently, more grotesquely than the Biden administration,” Hawley told the Senate. “For four long years, this administration carried out one persecution after another against people of faith.”
Hawley called out former President Joe Biden for pardons of his own family members for “illegalities” and condemned the pardons by the ex-president of “drug lords and killers and murderers and kingpins,” while he prosecuted a Soviet concentration camp survivor who’s in a wheelchair simply for her pro-life views.
“It does not get morally worse than that, morally debased any more than that,” said Hawley about Biden’s attack on pro-lifers.
During the signing of the pardons, Trump said none of the 23 people should have been prosecuted and noted that many of them were elderly.
“This is a great honor to sign this,” he said of the pardons, before calling the prosecutions “ridiculous.”
Hawley highlighted some of the FACE act cases pursued by Biden, including the prosecution of Mark Houck who was charged under FACE after a pro abortion protester allegedly attacked his young son.
Houck was eventually acquitted.
Others weren’t so lucky, necessitating the Trump pardons.
Lauren Handy, who Hawley said discovered boxes of 115 fetal remains from illegal late term abortions, was given the longest sentence ever under the FACE Act – 57 months – for protests at an abortion facility in 2020.
“My belief that was formed after watching the video [of the abortion facility] was if the fetus survived the abortion attempt, they were left to die” inside the facility, Handy said about the motive behind the protests.
Handy was prosecuted in 2022 under Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ).
Another of the pardoned, Eva Edl, 89, was sent to a communist concentration camp in Yugoslavia earlier in her life, but eventually migrated to the U.S.
“This concentration camp survivor, 89 years old, immigrant to this country, was put in prison, federal prison by the last administration because she sang hymns from a wheelchair,” said Hawley.
Edl was sentenced to three years’ probation.
“I’ve paid the price,” Edl said of her pro-life work, according to the Daily Wire. “It hurts deeply when you do what God says and you’re totally misunderstood.”
The St. Thomas More Society told The Lion it represented 21 of the 23 pardoned, “who have been unjustly prosecuted, convicted, and in several cases, imprisoned, by the Biden DOJ.”
In a statement, the Catholic legal group characterized the pro-life protesters pardoned by Trump as “heroic.”
“Today is a new day for the pardoned pro-life advocates who have suffered FBI raids, federal prosecutions, and severe punishment for peacefully and courageously witnessing for life,” said Peter Breen, Head of Litigation for St. Thomas More Society. “We thank President Trump for keeping his promise to these pro-life mothers, fathers, grandparents, pastors, and priests.”
The group is urging the repeal of the FACE Act in light of the abuses by the Biden administration, so “the Justice Department can never again weaponize this law to target peaceful pro-lifers with severe charges.”
