The following is a Catholic Action League of Massachusetts news release…
League Applauds Trump Pardon
of Pro-Life Prisoners of Conscience
The Catholic Action League of Massachusetts today is applauding the pardons, granted yesterday, to 23 pro-life rescuers, by President Donald J. Trump.
On two occasions in the last sixteen months, Donald Trump stated that he would invoke executive clemency in the matter of federally imprisoned pro-life activists, whom he said were “unjustly persecuted by the Biden administration.”
That promise was fulfilled on January 23rd. President Trump said it was “a great honor” to sign these pardons.
The 23 pro-life rescuers, many of them elderly, and some in poor health, were convicted in federal court for non-violent acts of civil disobedience, while trying to prevent the killing of innocent children, at abortion facilities.
They were the target of an ideologically driven, unequal application of the 1994 Freedom of Access To Clinic Entrances Act (FACE) by the Biden Justice Department.
Although the legislation ostensibly protects houses of worship and crisis pregnancy centers, only two of 25 FACE prosecutions brought by the Biden DOJ involved pro-abortion extremists who attacked pregnancy care centers.
Despite an epidemic of more than 400 incidents of arson and vandalism directed against churches, parish facilities, and religious iconography since the leak of the Dobbs decision in 2022, there has never been a FACE prosecution for an attack upon a religious institution.
The pro-life rescuers were not only the victims of selective prosecution, but received excessive punishments.
The author and sponsor of the FACE Act, the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy, stated that the measure did not envision first offences as felonies.
Unable to use only the FACE law to impose multi-year prison sentences on peaceful protesters, the Biden DOJ resorted to the Conspiracy Against Rights statute — the so-called Ku Klux Klan Act — as a kind of prosecutorial accelerant to ensure that these pro-life rescuers would be incarcerated in federal prisons.
Two of those pardoned, Jean Marshall, 75, and Paulette Harlow, 76, are Massachusetts residents and volunteers with Operation Rescue Boston. Paulette, who suffers from multiple health problems, was due to begin her term in prison on February 1st.
Jean Marshall is being released from the Federal Correctional Institution, Danbury.
Responding to the joyous news, Bill Cotter, the President of Operation Rescue Boston, said “We are overjoyed at the pardoning of these pro-life rescuers, and are especially glad that Jean and Paulette are free once more. Thank you, God; and thank you, President Trump.”
The pardons came just two days after President Trump withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization, the United Nations agency which promotes abortion and contraception throughout the globe.
The Catholic Action League called the pardons “an act of justice and of mercy, for which President Trump ought to be thanked and commended.”
Catholic Action League Executive Director C. J. Doyle made the following comment:
“For Catholics, a Christian conception of a just government is one that protects the poor from the rich and defends the weak from the strong. Today, President Trump imparted relief to poor, frail, weak and unselfish prisoners of conscience, putting an end to their suffering, and delivering them from the power and the vengeance of a partisan and weaponized Department of Justice.
Morally, they committed no crime. As Saint Augustine, and the Angelic Doctor, Saint Thomas Aquinas, taught, ‘An unjust law is no law.’
The rescuers only sought to save, peacefully, the lives of the innocent unborn, who Saint Teresa of Calcutta described, prophetically, as the ‘poorest of the poor.‘
May God bless President Donald Trump, and may the Holy Ghost inspire him to seek justice, always, for the innocent pre-born!”
Image courtesy of the Thomas More Society, from their article, “President Trump Pardons 23 Pro-Lifers Targeted by Biden Justice Department Under the FACE Act.”
