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Michigan Jury Finds Seven Pro-Lifers Guilty of FACE Act Violations for Preventing Baby Deaths


By: Beth Brelje | August 21, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/08/21/michigan-jury-finds-7-guilty-of-face-act-violation/Gallery of Political Quotes, Politically INCORRECT Cartoons, and WhatDidYouSay Drawings

Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. — Proverbs 24:11

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The Department of Justice (DOJ) continues to hound pro-life activists who go to abortion businesses and try to convince pregnant women not to kill their babies.

A Detroit, Michigan, jury found seven pro-lifers guilty Tuesday of engaging in a civil rights conspiracy and violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act for standing and sitting in front of the door of the Northland Family Planning Clinic in Sterling Heights, Michigan, Aug. 27, 2020.

The 1994 Clinton-era FACE Act makes it a federal crime to intimidate or interfere with someone getting an abortion. Combined with the conspiracy charge the DOJ has added to recent FACE charges, the combined convictions carry a penalty of up to 11 years and up to $250,000 in fines. In this case, the conspiracy was about posting and live-streaming the group’s actions on social media.

According to the DOJ indictment, those convicted in this case sat in front of the abortion business’ door and refused to move when women tried to get inside. Later, the police asked them to move and they did not move until they were arrested.  

Guided by faith, those convicted in this case say the Bible specifically tells them to act on behalf of voiceless babies scheduled for abortion, citing Proverbs 24:11, “Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter.” 

The convicted include Calvin Zastrow, a Michigan preacher, and his daughter Eva Zastrow, 26, a missionary worker; and Chester Gallagher of Tennessee, a former police officer who left his job and joined the pro-life movement when he realized they were trying to stop a “murder in progress,” as he often says.

Gallagher presented defense arguments on his own behalf but was aided by Thomas More Society attorneys.

“Yet again, the Biden-Harris Department of Justice has decided to characterize the actions of peaceful pro-lifers as a felony ‘Conspiracy Against Rights,’ punishable by over a decade in federal prison. After the overturning of Roe v. Wade, we believe the FACE Act to be unconstitutional, and we will continue to advocate on behalf of peaceful pro-life citizens like Chet Gallagher, Lauren Handy, and Paul Vaughn, who have been targeted with harsh prosecution by this Department of Justice,” Thomas More Society Senior Counsel Steve Crampton said in a statement. “We also believe that the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Fischer v. United States confirms that the Department of Justice’s novel strategy to inflict maximize pain upon peaceful pro-lifers by adding a charge of felony Conspiracy Against Rights cannot be squared with the law and we stand ready to make that case.”

Also found guilty were Justin Phillips, a missionary, and Joel Curry, 31, an evangelist, both of Michigan.

“Apparently there were 40 babies scheduled to die that day, at least six to nine women came back. That means at least 30 women had reconsidered,” Curry told The Federalist in a phone interview after the guilty verdict. He was grateful they were not taken immediately to prison, as has happened in previous FACE cases. The convicted will be sentenced at a later date.

Heather Idoni, 59, a mother of 15, including 10 adopted from Ukraine, was also found guilty. Idoni, a former Christian bookstore owner, is currently held in federal prison for a previous FACE Act conviction in Washington, D.C.

Also convicted was Eva Edl, 89, of South Carolina.

Both Edl and Idoni believe they may die before being released from prison. If they are sentenced to the full 11 years, Edl would be 100 at the end of the sentence. These two have another FACE violation for blocking a door at a Saginaw, Michigan, abortion mill on April 16, 2021.

As a child, Edl was taken by train cattle car as a prisoner to the Gakova concentration camp in Yugoslavia, where she faced starvation and was surrounded by death, but ultimately was able to escape.

If people in her town would have stood on the train tracks to block the train and spoken up about the children being taken to the camp, Edl has said in interviews, the government might have stopped sooner. Today she considers sitting in front of the doors of abortion businesses her way of sitting on the train tracks.

Cracking Down on FACE

Most of the pro-life activists in this case have been going to abortion businesses for years and have often been successful at persuading women to save their babies’ lives. Many offer women continued help after they decide to continue their pregnancy.

None had been charged with FACE in previous years, but charges started coming after the Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe. v. Wade. Soon President Joe Biden issued an executive order directing his administration to address possible “heightened safety and security risks related to the provision of reproductive healthcare services.”

In July 2022, the DOJ announced it was forming the Reproductive Rights Task Force, listing enforcement of the FACE Act as one of its goals.

Since the formation of the task force, the DOJ has reached back in time and charged pro-lifers with the FACE Act multiple times. Calvin Zastrow, Eva Zastrow, Heather Idoni, Eva Edl, and Chester Gallagher were previously found guilty in January for praying, singing church hymns, blocking the door, and talking to women at a Tennessee abortion mill in March 2021. They were not charged until October 2022. By the time they were charged, Tennessee had outlawed abortion except in rare cases, and the abortion mill where they prayed has suspended its operations.

Earlier this week U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray questioning the DOJ’s weaponization of the FACE Act against pro-life Americans.

 “Since January 2021, the Civil Rights Division has charged 24 FACE Act cases against 55 defendants, with only two of these cases — consisting of five defendants — originating from attacks on pregnancy resource centers. This data is particularly troubling in light of the fact that there have been at least 90 individual cases of attacks on pro-life organizations and pregnancy resource centers since the May 2022 leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion for the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case.”

But at a recent hearing, Wray testified it was the opposite: that more abortion-related violent extremism investigations focused on violence against pro-life facilities.

Roy’s letter requests that documents proving Wray’s claim be provided to the Committee on the Judiciary by Sept. 2.

Former President Donald Trump said in June that if elected, he would let those charged with the FACE Act out of prison.

Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.

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ABORTION/PRO LIFE, Law, Political

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Veteran-owned business announces it will cover employees’ parental leave, adoption costs


Reported By Samantha Kamman, Christian Post Reporter

Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/news/veteran-owned-business-covering-employees-pregnancy-adoption-costs.html/

Father reading a book on the sofa with his baby daughter sleeping on his lap on the sofa. | Getty Images/ pabst_ell

After corporations across the nation announced they would cover employees’ travel expenses to get abortions in other states following the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, a veteran-owned business in Texas has responded by offering to pay for employees’ parental leave and adoption costs. 

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case involving Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban, stated that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion, leaving individual states to determine its legality.

In response, over 60 major companies stated their intentions to reimburse employees traveling for an abortion if they live in states that ban the practice, according to a list compiled by Reuters. 

Instead of covering employees’ abortion-related travel expenses, Buffer Insurance announced in a June 27 post on its Facebook page that the company would provide benefits for employees who are giving birth to or adopting a baby. The company plans to cover the medical costs of childbirth or adoption and offer paid maternity or paternity leave.

“After the overturn of Roe v. Wade, we took the opposite stance that these big corporations are making, and they’re making it easier for people to abort their babies. We want to make it easy for employees to grow their families,” Buffer Insurance President Sean Turner told The Christian Post in an interview. 

“And then if employees want to grow their families through adoption, we want to pay towards those expenses as well,” he added. 

Turner added that Buffer Insurance is working with “any and all” employers to help them implement the same benefits and offer them to their employees.

“We realize that a lot of large corporations have some of these policies in place. But specifically, we’re a small and young company, so we really want to activate the majority of people who work for other small, midsize organizations,” he said. “So those are the ones that we think are going to have the most impact by implementing these types of policies of generosity in their own business.” 

One of the ready-to-use policies Buffer Insurance promotes to other employers includes a lactation policy. Turner explained that this policy offers lactating mothers time to pump breast milk for their babies while they’re at work.

In addition, Turner said that Buffer Insurance is working with employers to help them maximize the benefits and minimize the taxes associated with providing employees with bonuses. He explained that the idea is to offer employees resources and “avoid a lot of waste.” 

“Let’s say, for example, an employer is saying, I want to give $5,000 to an employee’s birth. If they were just adding that to their employees’ check as a bonus, there are taxes that employers pay as well as the employee,” Turner said.

“So maybe by the time they receive that, it’s only $4,200 or $3,200. So there are ways that we talk about in these resources to avoid those taxes, and it still is a 100% tax-deductible item for the employer.”

“We really encourage business owners and business leaders in different communities to implement something like this that includes a lot of generosity towards their employees,” he concluded. 

Earlier this month, The Walt Disney Co. promised in an internal memo obtained by CNBC that it would pay for employees to travel out of state for abortions. In addition to “family planning (including pregnancy-related decisions),” the coverage extends to non-pregnancy situations, including cancer treatments, transplants and rare disease treatment. 

“Our company remains committed to removing barriers and providing comprehensive access to quality and affordable care for all of our employees, cast members and their families, including family planning and reproductive care, no matter where they live,” the memo reads. 

Dozens of other companies, including DICK’S Sporting Goods, Goldman Sachs, Apple and Nike have also announced plans to reimburse employees traveling out of state for abortions.  

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Business, Family, Political, Spiritual

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Democrats’ Massive Entitlement Plans Include Banning Christians From Government Childcare


Reported By Joy Pullmann | DECEMBER 13, 2021

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/13/democrats-massive-entitlement-plans-include-banning-christians-from-government-childcare/

Democrats’ current proposed $3.5 trillion welfare expansion would effectively ban faithful Christians from profiting from federal subsidies for separating infants and toddlers from their families. The current text of Democrats’ massive “Build Back Better” entitlement bill contains provisions that would require religious child-care providers to disavow longstanding theology about sex in order to receive federal child-care funds under a massive new early childhood program.

“The Democrats went out of their way to make sure and prohibit religious care providers from receiving any of these funds, and unanimously rejected an amendment to allow all child-care providers to be eligible for grants, including religious providers,” said Rep. Jackie Walorski, R-Indiana, the ranking member on the House’s subcommittee on Worker and Family Support.

Democrats’ legislation would create a new federally controlled child-care entitlement available to the majority of families in the nation. The legislation authorizes up to $20 billion in the program’s first year, $30 billion in its second, $40 billion in its third, and an unlimited amount after that. The estimated cost of this program over the next ten years is $400 billion.

“Making faith-based providers of child-care and pre-kindergarten into recipients of federal financial assistance triggers federal compliance obligations and non-discrimination provisions,” note the leaders of several religious organizations in an opposition letter to Senate Democrats last week.

This means potentially forcing religious organizations to deny all theology that acknowledges basic truths about human biology and reproduction. Given the state of federal “nondiscrimination” law, this could include forcing religious organizations to allow males into female bathrooms, hire transgender babysitters, and teach small children that men can turn themselves into women and that theologically condemned sex acts are in fact morally good.

Just one-third of American children younger than five are placed in center-based care, according to federal statistics. Sixty-three percent of American kids ages five and younger are cared for by family, and 11 percent by a babysitter or nanny. Most American kids ages 0 to 5 who do have regular childcare are away from their parents only part-time. Among the minority of American families who enroll young children in full-time care, 53 percent currently choose a religious facility, according to a January 2021 survey of parents from the Bipartisan Policy Center. Family care was parents’ top preference for their children, with religious-based care the second-most preferred option in the BPC poll.

Democrats’ bill would also likely dramatically increase the costs of childcare by increasing the licensing requirements for people the government pays to babysit tiny children. Most child care workers have low education levels, but states usually don’t raise their licensing requirements because that would reduce the availability of government-controlled child care.

Numerous studies have found that the quality of language and interaction available to a child in infancy and early childhood is extremely important to that child’s intellectual and social development. Studies have also found that frequent one-on-one interaction between a small child and his parents benefits early language development even if the child’s parents are poorly educated. This effect disappears, however, if that poorly educated mother is employed to care for many tiny children at once instead of one of her own to whom she can fully dedicate her attention and conversation time.

Research also resoundingly finds that living with married parents provides far bigger positive benefits to children for their entire lives than does attending an early childhood program.

Large early childhood programs are of notoriously poor quality. The major existing such program, Head Start, has failed to improve attendees’ education and life prospects in all the quality research done on the program that has spent some $250 billion from taxpayers since it began in 1965. In fact, federal research has found that children who participated in Head Start later learned less in math and behaved worse than peers who didn’t participate.

The research that shows any long-term benefit to children of attending early childhood programs derives such results from small-scale, boutique programs that employed teachers and support staff such as doctors who were much better educated than the typical daycare or preschool employee.

Research also shows mass programs that separate small children from their parents decrease children’s intellectual abilities and increase their aggression, risky behavior, and later likelihood of committing crimes. They also tend to erode parenting skills. The more time a small child spends away from his mother, the worse such negative effects tend to get.

“The amount of hours spent in day care each week during the first four years of life was the key child care predictor of behavioral problems,” writes social scientist Dr. Jenet Erickson in a review of several such studies. “In fact, the statistical effect size of the relationship between day care hours and caregiver reports of behavioral problems at age four and a half was so strong that it was comparable to the effect of poverty. Importantly, these statistical effects did not diminish as children aged.”

High-quality studies found that children who attended Tennessee’s state-run pre-K program had worse behavior and academic outcomes than children who did not. Children who attended Quebec’s universal early childcare program were 22 percent more likely to be convicted of a crime in young adulthood compared to children who did not participate in the program. Children separated from their parents in their youngest years through Quebec’s program also demonstrated greater emotional fragility that lasted into adulthood.

“The left is at war with religion and family-centered things. They think cradle to grave, government knows best,” Walorski said.

Walorski has sponsored legislation that would expand tax-free savings accounts families can use to pay for their own child care, tutoring, enrichment activities such as music lessons and summer camp, and more.

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Political, Religion

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