{"id":981356,"date":"2023-02-03T11:00:12","date_gmt":"2023-02-03T11:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/?p=420804"},"modified":"2023-02-03T11:00:12","modified_gmt":"2023-02-03T11:00:12","slug":"reproductive-rights-activists-charged-under-law-intended-to-protect-abortion-clinics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/02\/03\/reproductive-rights-activists-charged-under-law-intended-to-protect-abortion-clinics\/","title":{"rendered":"Reproductive Rights Activists Charged Under Law Intended to Protect Abortion Clinics"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Freedom of<\/u> Access to Clinic Entrances, or FACE, Act was not written in response to acts like those Caleb Freestone and Amber Smith-Stewart are alleged to have committed. Instead, the law was meant to deal with the unchecked violence of people on the opposite side of the same issue.<\/p>\n
Congress passed the FACE Act in 1994, following the assassinations of two abortion doctors and a bodyguard outside two clinics in Pensacola, Florida. At that time, anti-abortion groups nationwide were organizing aggressive mass clinic blockades, sometimes with many hundreds of people. Vehicles, chains, and locks were used to terrify abortion seekers and thwart their ability to enter clinics; threats of violence against clinic workers and patients were ubiquitous.<\/p>\n
The FACE Act, which passed with bipartisan support, made the physical obstruction of clinics a federal offense, as well as threats of force and violence against clinic workers and clinic property. In its 30 years on the books, it has been used sparingly. Until recently, the roughly 100 cases<\/a> filed were all against\u00a0people who made targeted threats against individual abortion clinic workers, perpetrated arson and shooting attacks at clinics, and attempted physical blockades to stop abortions.<\/p>\n Now this law, introduced in response to very real threats and deadly violence against abortion providers, is being used to prosecute<\/a> two reproductive rights activists, who allegedly spray-painted the outside walls of misleading and dangerous<\/a> \u201ccrisis pregnancy centers\u201d\u00a0\u2014 known as CPCs\u00a0\u2014 in Florida. Freestone, 27, and Smith-Stewart, 23, face up to 12 years in prison for graffiti, which the Justice Department is calling a threat to \u201creproductive health services facilities.\u201d<\/p>\n It is both a grim application of one of the few federal laws that has served imperiled abortion clinics and a gross misuse of the term \u201creproductive health services\u201d to describe what the facilities in question provide.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is yet another example of the government disproportionately charging alleged activists with serious crimes in an attempt to deter political opposition to the fall of Roe post Dobbs,\u201d Lauren Regan, the director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center and attorney for defendant Smith-Stewart, told me. \u201cTagging private property might be a violation, but it should not be a federal crime.\u201d<\/p>\n The graffiti in<\/u> question\u00a0\u2014 a level of property damage fixable with a coat of paint\u00a0\u2014 was part of a series of similar small actions against anti-abortion centers across the country following last year\u2019s leak of the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe. Slogans including, \u201cIf abortions aren\u2019t safe, neither are you,\u201d and, \u201cWe are everywhere,\u201d were daubed on exterior walls of fake clinics and anti-abortion network headquarters. Online, communiques from Jane\u2019s Revenge \u2014 an umbrella name for a political stance, not an organized group\u00a0\u2014 claimed responsibility for the independent acts.<\/p>\n For decades, leftists have used the tactic of acting autonomously under a unifying banner to signify solidarity with a broader cause. Those spray-painting in the name of Jane\u2019s Revenge in Wisconsin, for example, almost certainly have no direct connection or knowledge of those doing the same in Florida or elsewhere. The goal is to spread a shared message and suggest a movement\u2019s latent power. Yet, for as many decades, right-wing media pundits and law enforcement have responded with paranoid, if not purposeful, miscomprehension.<\/p>\n\n Fox News has dubbed Jane\u2019s Revenge an \u201cextremist group.\u201d The FBI is currently offering a bounty for information on Jane\u2019s Revenge activities, pledging \u201cup to $25,000 for information leading to the identification, arrest, and conviction of the suspect(s) responsible for these crimes.\u201d The crime, that is, of low-level property damage, transmuted into potential federal offenses through a mangling of the FACE Act. The indictments in Florida are part of a broader campaign by law enforcement to draw a false equivalence between anti-abortion zealots and those fighting against the decimation of our reproductive freedoms.<\/p>\n \u201cThe level of bothsideism here by the DOJ goes beyond absurdity. Frankly, this is something I would have expected to see from the Trump Administration,\u201d said Hayley McMahon, a public health researcher who studies abortion and criminalization at Emory University. \u201cDespite a rapidly growing number of clinic invasions<\/a>, bullets fired through clinic windows, and other acts of violence, FACE is rarely even used by the DOJ to charge anti-abortion protesters who disrupt care at licensed clinics.\u201d McMahon told me that the Justice Department is \u201csetting an incredibly irresponsible precedent for recognizing CPCs as medical facilities that provide reproductive health services.\u201d<\/p>\n The Justice Department\u2019s<\/u> statement on Freestone and Smith-Stewart\u2019s indictments was as misleading as the \u201ccrisis pregnancy centers\u201d that the defendants allegedly targeted. It claims that \u201cthe defendants targeted pregnancy resource facilities and vandalized those facilities with spray-painted threats\u201d and that they used \u201cthreats of force\u201d against employees at one clinic \u201cbecause those employees were providing or seeking to provide reproductive health services.\u201d This is laughable: It is precisely because these anti-abortion centers do not provide reproductive health services that they have become targets. They are part of a well-funded, Republican- and Supreme Court-supported machinery of forced births, criminalization, and pregnancy-related deaths.<\/p>\n The use of the FACE Act in these cases is an affront to the law\u2019s spirit but not its letter. The statute\u2019s wording applies to all \u201creproductive health centers,\u201d a label which the fake clinics have been odiously permitted to bear. As the Justice Department\u2019s website notes, \u201cThe FACE Act is not about abortions. The statute protects all patients, providers, and facilities that provide reproductive health services, including pro-life pregnancy counseling services and any other pregnancy support facility providing reproductive health care.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cCrisis pregnancy clinics\u201d should not be afforded such legal protections. They are anti-abortion centers, dedicated to dissuading people from getting abortions with highly deceptive practices. They pose as reproductive health clinics and \u201cpregnancy help centers,\u201d often offering pregnancy tests and ultrasounds to give the veneer of medical legitimacy, but these well-funded, sometimes taxpayer-supported, Christian organizations have the explicit mission to stop abortions.<\/p>\n\u201cDespite a rapidly growing number of\u00a0clinic invasions, bullets fired through clinic windows, and other acts of violence, FACE is rarely even used by the DOJ to charge anti-abortion protesters who disrupt care at licensed clinics.\u201d<\/blockquote><\/span><\/p>\n