Last spring, I attended a gala in Grand Forks celebrating 20 years of the St. Gianna and Pietro Molla Maternity Home’s existence. Christopher Bell, the husband of then-imprisoned pro-lifer Joan Bell, was among the speakers that evening.
Joan was imprisoned in March 2022 under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, or F.A.C.E. Act, which became part of U.S. law in 1994, and prohibits physical force, threats of physical force and physical obstruction meant to injure, intimidate, or interfere with those seeking abortions. It simultaneously protects religious-freedom rights, along with prohibiting “the intentional damage or destruction of” an abortion facility or place of religious worship.
The pro-life community has maintained that Joan’s protests were both peaceful and prayerful, and at the event last spring, prayers began in earnest for her release. On Jan. 24, those prayers were answered, and she attended the March for Life in Washington, D.C., that same day.
We local pro-life sidewalk advocates have felt the effects of the unjust applications of this law while praying weekly at the Red River Women’s Clinic. Though the F.A.C.E. Act has been in existence for over two decades, it had not been directly put before me until the last year or so.
Specifically, this law has been recited to me by those commissioned to make sure women have a safe entry and exit from the local abortion facility. In a word, the law seems to have empowered escorts to go beyond their call of duty, to the point of demonstrating the kind of threatening behavior they’re supposed to defend their clients against.
As this act has been read to me as an intimidation measure, I’ve wondered if the escorts missed the part of the law which protects “protesting outside of abortion facilities, distributing literature, carrying signs, shouting (without threats), singing hymns and counseling.”
This latter portion describes our actions at the Red River Women’s Clinic in Moorhead on Wednesdays, when abortions typically take place. Along with throwing the F.A.C.E. Act in our faces by recitation, the escorts have used shovels, squeaky toys and car horns to try to drown out our offers of help.
Thankfully, some positive changes seem to be at play.
For one, we will soon have a pregnancy-resource center up and running directly south of the abortion facility; this will undoubtedly save lives. Secondly, we’ve been overjoyed at the release of those pro-lifers in other parts of the country. As they are freed to return to using their voices to more actively fighting for those without voices — our pre-born citizens — we, too, are freed.
While I agree that violence cannot solve the problem of abortion, in assessing these situations, let’s remember that abortion itself is a violence.
Meantime, the Women’s Care Center can connect pregnant women in distress and their families directly to resources to not only improve their situations in the short term, but to give them hope, and come alongside them, in the long term as well — thanks be to God.
[For the sake of having a repository for my newspaper columns and articles, I reprint them here, with permission, a week after their run date. The preceding ran in The Forum newspaper on Feb. 2, 2025.]
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