Abortion clinic access law takes it on the chin from 90-year-old Soviet death camp survivor
by Valerie Richardson · The Washington TimesEva Edl turns 91 on Sunday, but she had no problem delivering a body blow Tuesday to the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act.
Ms. Edl, a survivor of a Soviet concentration camp, described how she was convicted of FACE Act violations under the Biden administration for standing in front of the door of an abortion clinic in Saginaw, Michigan, and faced up to 13 years in prison until she was pardoned by President Trump.
She urged Congress to repeal the FACE Act, comparing her protest to being transported by train as a child to a Soviet death camp in Yugoslavia.
“While being locked up in that car, I wished that some people would have had put their bodies on those tracks to bring that train to a stop and set us free,” Ms. Edl told the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government.
“I thought of the word of the Lord Jesus in Matthew 7 that I should do unto others as I would have them do unto me,” she said. “So I knew I had to place my body between those victims and the abortionists, no matter what the cost.”
Her testimony offered a compelling example of what House Republicans decried as the “over-federalizing” of criminal law, arguing that state and local law enforcement should be in charge of prosecuting criminal cases like hers, not the federal government.
“Her case is not an outlier. It is a warning about what happens when the federal government takes jurisdiction over local conduct, and then applies that power selectively, guided not by equal justice but political priority,” said Rep. Chip Roy, the Texas Republican who chairs the panel.
“This should concern every American regardless of their views on the underlying issue,” he said. “Because the real problem isn’t just about how this law has been abused, it’s the permanent expansion of federal power that it represents.”
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Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the committee’s ranking Democrat, said that if pro-life activists like Ms. Edl do the crime, they should be willing to do the time, as did Martin Luther King Jr. and protesters from the civil-rights era.
“What these protesters have a problem with is other people accessing their own healthcare,” he said.
House Democrats balked at the hearing’s focus, saying that the GOP-led committee has already held three hearings in the last three years on the FACE Act, the 1994 law that makes it a federal crime to interfere with access to an abortion clinic or pro-life pregnancy center.
“No matter how many times the enemies of reproductive rights try to rewrite history or drum up new conspiracies about the FACE Act, the facts remain the same: We continue to see criminal obstruction and threats and intimidation of abortion providers and women seeking those services, and the FACE Act is needed now as much as it has ever been,” said Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, Pennsylvania Democrat, the subcommittee’s ranking member.
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House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan called it “exactly the right time” for a hearing, citing the Justice Department’s April 21 release of an 882-page report on the Biden administration’s weaponization of the FACE Act, as well as last week’s Southern Poverty Law Center indictments on bank and wire fraud.
The federal indictment accused the center of paying more than $3 million to informants who were members of White supremacist groups.
Mr. Jordan noted that the SPLC worked with the Biden Justice Department to train lawyers, and that the center was cited as a source on the infamous 2023 FBI Richmond field memo targeting “radical-traditionalist Catholics.”
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“What the DOJ report on the FACE Act showed was that in fact the DOJ was in cahoots with outside groups, similar to SPLC,” Roger Severino, a former Justice Department attorney who now serves as vice president of economic and domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation, said at the hearing.
“The left-wing groups get together and they pretty much create their own little branch offices within the DOJ whenever you have liberals in power,” he said. “SPLC had been talking to DOJ under Biden and certainly under Obama – Planned Parenthood Federation, National Abortion Federation, all of those folks.”
The DOJ report concluded that the Biden administration engaged in “selective prosecution” of pro-lifers under the FACE Act, charging 45 abortion foes versus five abortion-rights activists, despite nearly 100 attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers after the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
Democrats said the law counters the threats against abortion clinics, where 11 doctors and others have been murdered since 1977.
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Those criminals, Republicans said, were prosecuted under state and local laws. One convicted killer, Paul Hill, was executed in 2003.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Washington Democrat, said that “at the core of this issue is the basic principle that no one should fear violence in the workplace when seeking healthcare,” prompting a rebuke from Rep. Harriet Hageman, Wyoming Republican.
Ms. Hageman cited the Saturday assassination attempt against Mr. Trump and administration officials at the White House Correspondents Association dinner.
“I find it very rich that any Democrat would attempt to lecture us about violence in light of the fact that it was yet another one of theirs just three days ago who sought to assassinate our president and his Cabinet,” Ms. Hageman said.
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• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.