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U.S. President Donald Trump signs documents in the Oval Office at the White House on Inauguration Day in Washington Jan. 20, 2025.
OSV News photo/Carlos Barria, Reuters
January 21, 2025
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Leaders of Canada’s pro-life community stand in solidarity with the Thomas More Society in calling on U.S. President Donald Trump to fully and unconditionally pardon 21 American pro-lifers prosecuted, convicted and, in some cases, imprisoned by former president Joe Biden’s Department of Justice.
Grandparents, pastors, Nazi invasion and Soviet concentration camp survivor Eva Edl and Catholic priest Fidelis Moscinski are among the incarcerated.
People seeking pardons include eight individuals who entered and cordoned off a Washington, D.C., abortion facility in October 2020 by using chains and locks as barricades. Seven activists impeded an entrance to an abortion facility in Sterling Heights, Mich., in August 2020. Six others were convicted of obstructing an abortion facility in Mount Juliet, Tenn., in March 2021.
The Roman Catholic law firm based in Chicago forwarded a six-page pardon request package to Trump. In it, the counsellors informed Trump that their clients “have been heartened during their imprisonment and unjust prosecutions by your repeated messages to them during your campaign, urging them to persevere until you were able to take office, review their cases and free them.”
Trump has signalled his willingness publicly multiple times over the past year. During a February 2024 speech at the National Religious Broadcasters in Nashville, the 47th President alluded to “pro-life activists... convicted on outrageous charges,” and stated his willingness to review the convictions. He echoed these sentiments during a speech at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority Policy Conference in June.
Mary Wagner, the Canadian pro-life activist who has spent over six years in prison for her willingness to breach bubble zones, expressed gratitude to the Thomas More Society’s initiative “on behalf of these 21 pro-life brothers and sisters who are inarguably the targets of grave injustice.” She noted that “some of them, such as Will(iam Goodman), Heather (Idoni) and Jean (Marshall), seem to have received a double portion of suffering through illness, medical conditions and injuries.”
Wagner added that we must “give thanks to God” for “the truth that 21 men and women have found that our littlest brothers and sisters are worth at least several months and years of their freedom.”
Jonathon Van Maren, communications director of the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, wrote in an email to The Catholic Register that “societies that kill children have often persecuted those who tell the truth about these atrocities — and this produces prisoners of conscience. We very much hope a new administration will recognize the fundamental role pro-life advocates play in society and reverse this injustice."
Richard Dur, the executive director of Prolife Alberta, declared that “these pro-life advocates stand in the proud American tradition of peaceful dissent, acting with courage and compassion to protect the most vulnerable. Their quiet resolve — praying, linking arms and bearing witness — harkens back to the moral clarity of past civil rights movements. Yet they have been unjustly targeted, prosecuted and imprisoned by an administration more intent on silencing dissent than upholding fairness.”
Dur added that by Trump “granting these advocates pardons, he can reaffirm the principles of justice, mercy and freedom that millions of Americans look to him to uphold — a powerful message to the nation and the world that conscience and courage will always have a place in America.”
A substantial segment of the society's letter is devoted to articulating why Biden’s Department of Justice, which was led by now-former Attorney General Merrick Garland, improperly utilized the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1994. Lawyers also declared that provisions of the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, instituted following the Civil War era to protect Black Americans from acts of terror and lynch mobs, were deployed to secure 10-year felony sentences.
“Using this anti-Klan law against peaceful pro-life Americans is an outrageous affront to justice and tarnishes the legacy of our own Civil Rights Movement, equating mere peaceful civil rights protest with deadly racist violence,” stated the letter. “Neither the Clinton DOJ nor the Obama DOJ dared use this plainly inapplicable law against pro-life advocates.”
In a flurry of executive actions that he signed following his inauguration, Trump gave pardons to 1,500 demonstrators jailed for participating in the Capitol Hill riots in 2021 protesting the results of the 2020 election.
(Amundson is an associate editor and writer for The Catholic Register.)
A version of this story appeared in the January 26, 2025, issue of The Catholic Registerwith the headline "Canadians stand with call to free imprisoned pro-lifers".
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