Guest Post by Pro-life Leader Frank Pavone, National Director, Priests for Life
I was privileged to know Mother Teresa of Calcutta and to consult with her extensively during the last three years of her life, which coincided with the first three years of my fulltime leadership of Priests for Life.
In a visit with her in Calcutta in June of 1994, I discussed with her the bill that President Bill Clinton had signed into law just the previous month: The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act.
This law came into prominence again over the last couple of years as Joe Biden’s DOJ used it to prosecute pro-life activists who were peacefully intervening to save lives at abortion facilities. President Trump, understanding the injustice of this law, pardoned those activists in the first days of his second term, as promised.
I will have a discussion with several of them tonight at 8pm ET in a live broadcast on my EndAbortion.TV program.
One of the stories I will tell is what Mother Teresa said to me after I explained that this law punishes peaceful behavior of citizens who — convinced, as both science and morality show, that abortion kills a baby — therefore intervene to save that baby’s life. They may approach a woman entering the facility, in the hopes of persuading her to turn around and take the help the pro-life movement offers.
Or they may peacefully block the entrance to the clinic, trespassing indeed, but in the same way that any of us would willingly ignore a “No Trespassing” sign to save a child drowning in someone’s swimming pool.
Bill Clinton and the abortion lobby weren’t satisfied with the fact that state and local laws already punish trespassing and physical violence against people or property.
No, that wasn’t enough.
They were intent, while saying they were protecting abortion clients from intimidation, to impose that same intimidation on peaceful pro-life activists who wanted to lead those women away from those places of death.
Here were Mother Teresa’s exact words to me: ”Fr. Frank, if we had that law here in India, I would have been thrown in jail many times – because I go to the places where the abortions are done, and I take the women by the arm, and I pull them away from that place. I tell them to come with me, because our sisters and I will help them and their baby.”
Those who have been prosecuted under FACE, both under Biden and previously, should be proud. They stand with a saint revered by all the world, Catholic or not.
The FACE law is regarded by many, myself included, as both superfluous and unconstitutional. Efforts have been introduced in the 119th Congress to repeal this law, and those efforts should be supported. President Trump has already, by executive order, modified the enforcement of it to make sure people are not discriminated against because of their religious and pro-life convictions.
Now it’s time to get the law off the books altogether.
Shortly after the law was passed, I was offering brochures to mothers entering abortion facilities to invite them to choose alternatives to abortion. The pro-abortion protestors accused me of violating FACE, because they said that I was clearly intimidating them.
That’s just one simple example of how FACE lends itself so easily to vague and arbitrary interpretation, and to reverse intimidation of peaceful, pro-life people.
But more egregiously, the law seeks to put a cap on our love. It doesn’t require anyone to abort their baby, but it tries to limit how much we love the baby. Love has to be practical. We need to intervene to save the lives of the vulnerable. This law tells us we can love them from afar, but if we get too close to their bodies or to the instruments about to dismember those bodies, we are the ones who must be stopped.
We say no. There is no cap on love. We will be peaceful, but we will intervene. We will respect everybody, but we will abandon nobody.
Children are being killed, and laws that make it a crime to save them have no place in our country.
Prolife Leader Frank Pavone is the National Director of Priests for Life and President of Prolife Vote.
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