Remembering
James Robison

You are viewing a page from our archive site. To browse the latest Christian TV content on The Stream, click here.

Why Donald Trump Should Pardon the Pro-Lifers Who Are in Prison — And Why He Didn’t on Day One, Like the J6ers

By John Zmirak Published on January 23, 2025

Update: In the wake of this column, President Trump indeed issued the pardons requested here.

As a pro-life activist since age 11 — and a strong Trump supporter since age 50-something-or-other — I was disappointed that the president didn’t choose yesterday’s anniversary of the dead, discredited Roe v. Wade decision to pardon 21 peaceful pro-life protestors who were incarcerated by the Biden regime. Their imprisonment is grotesque, flowing from an appallingly one-sided law: the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which targets only pro-lifers.

Trump ought to endorse GOP efforts to repeal that Jim Crow-style legislation and pardon all 21 of the people now in prison because of it — and he should announce both decisions this week. After all, he already freed some 1,500 other political prisoners — the January 6 election integrity protestors. Mary Margaret Olohan of The Daily Wire reports that a pardon seems likely, and perhaps will be announced “within days.”

Attorneys for the indispensable Thomas More Society

submitted to the incoming Trump administration formal requests for presidential pardons on behalf of 21 pro-life advocates who have been unjustly prosecuted, convicted, and in several cases, imprisoned, by the Biden Department of Justice. In their letter submitted to President Donald J. Trump, Thomas More Society attorneys “urge that these pro-life Americans are deserving of full and unconditional pardons.”

The pardon request package includes 21 individual pardon requests, one for each pro-life advocate, outlining the specific facts of each case, their upstanding personal and moral character, and the reasons why President Trump should grant a presidential pardon. The pardon request package also includes a cover letter outlining the legal rationale for the requested pardons and explains how the Biden DOJ routinely and unconstitutionally weaponized the … (FACE) Act and “Conspiracy Against Rights” statute against peaceful pro-life advocates.

The 21 pro-life advocates for whom Thomas More Society has submitted pardon requests are: Joan Bell, Coleman Boyd, Joel Curry, Jonathan Darnel, Eva Edl, Chester Gallagher, William Goodman, Dennis Green, Lauren Handy, Paulette Harlow, John Hinshaw, Heather Idoni, Jean Marshall, Fr. Fidelis Moscinski, Justin Phillips, Paul Place, Paul Vaughn, Bevelyn Beatty Williams, Calvin Zastrow, Eva Zastrow, and James Zastrow.

These people, alongside the peaceful January 6 protestors, are the most admirable of Americans. They are heroes.

So why hasn’t Trump acted yet? What can pro-lifers do to regain our influence over this administration? What do we need to do differently?

Those are the questions I want to examine here, in a sober political analysis. I’ll leave it to other pro-lifers to reiterate the moral case for liberating these additional prisoners of conscience, and protecting unborn Americans.

The J6ers Had to Come First. It’s Obvious.

Why did Trump pardon the January 6 victims first? In large part, because they were suffering directly for supporting him. Some of their judges, in their sentencing statements, explicitly said so — lawlessly adding months or years to prison terms because the defendants wouldn’t back down over the 2020 election steal, or their backing for Trump. Those prisoners are core members of Trump’s own tribe, and he would have squandered the loyalty of millions of his most emphatic backers (myself included) had he left these wounded warriors behind.

By contrast, the pro-lifers were fighting for unborn children they’ve never met, who cannot vote, who likely would be born to and raised by liberal Democrats who disproportionately are people of color. The fact that such pro-lifers risk prison to save people mostly outside their own tribe makes them morally admirable — but not as politically powerful.

We Must Speak Truth into Power

It’s the job of the pro-life movement to translate the moral strength of the pro-life case into political power. But since Roe v. Wade went to the legal waste dumpster in 2022, much of that movement has failed to move the needle. See the Ohio referendum making abortion legal through-birth. Our side failed to spend the necessary money to counter massive, Soros-funded media blitzes that fooled voters into passing it. It’s also true that the fall of Roe v. Wade was always going to trigger a powerful backlash from the  cash-rich and taxpayer-funded abortion industry and its dead-end feminist allies. There is no way out of that but through.

It’s crucial that pro-lifers realize that Trump’s weakened commitment to our issues isn’t the cause of our political weakness; it’s the result. We haven’t convinced enough of our fellow citizens to make ourselves an essential political constituency that politicians need to placate — the way the gun lobby, the Israel lobby, and now the J6 movement have. (See my friend Jason Jones’s brilliant reflection on that, “The Pro-Life Art of War.”)

Those Lavender, Paid-Off Bishops

One key reason why pro-lifers aren’t front and center of the MAGA coalition — even though most Trump supporters are also pro-life — is their organizational ties to the U.S. Catholic bishops. Those prelates, who lose 40% of native-born Catholics (and high percentages of migrants) to apostasy, are performatively pro-life some of the time. But their main issue since Trump first won in 2016 has been importing illegal immigrants into America to fill their emptying pews and generate hundreds of millions of dollars each year in federal contracts for serving them via corrupt, human trafficking nonprofits such as Catholic Charities.

For months, we’ve been hearing from one bishop after another, denouncing Trump’s plan to remove the 10 million-plus illegal immigrants the Biden regime cynically waved in. Back in 2017, bishops were among the loudest denouncing Trump’s efforts to determine whether minor children’s companions were really their families or human traffickers. Under Biden, Trump’s DNA tests were suspended and traffickers had a field day. As a result, some 250,000 migrant children (just from 2024) are now in the wind — likely trapped in sweatshops or the sex industry.

The bishops were silent about that.

The Mindless Garment

Worst of all are the bishops who claim that de facto open borders is a “life issue,” and equate sending migrants home with sending unborn babies to medical waste incinerators. The “Seamless Garment” rhetoric created in the 1980s by leftist bishops like Cardinal Joseph Bernardin crippled the pro-life movement by convincing people that you couldn’t ban killing children for sexual convenience unless you also banned guns, emptied Death Row, opened the borders, and imposed full-on socialism. In other words, “pro-life” implied a crackpot, Utopian program that nobody fully supports. The Seamless Garment did its job, providing moral cover for pro-abortion politicos with Irish and Italian last names and hobbling efforts to legally protect unborn kids. (A tip of the hat to Screwtape, and to Bernardin down there with him, for that one.)

Insofar as pro-lifers keep rubbing shoulders with bishops who take such radical leftist stances, they lose the trust of MAGA voters and of Trump himself. Pro-lifers who want to make MAGA genuinely pro-life and influence the president need to do more than walk away from dead, legacy institutions such as the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops and their captive, crooked nonprofits. They must step up and proactively denounce the hijacking of pro-life language by bishops (and even the pope) in service of leftist politics that have nothing to do with the sanctity of life. In fact, I’d suggest that some leaders drop their “single-issue” focus and come out publicly in support of Trump’s deportations and other immigration initiatives.

Please Support The Stream: Equipping Christians to Think Clearly About the Political, Economic, and Moral Issues of Our Day.

Want to get Trump’s attention, and maybe move him to back more pro-life laws? Be the pro-life leader who backs him on the issue that got him elected three separate times: securing our country from lawless foreign invasion. When your local bishop denounces you by name and disinvites you from the annual rubber chicken pro-life leaders banquet, laugh at him — personally, in public, in his face. Then call him out as the human trafficking profiteer he really is.

The same kind of people who oppose chaos on our borders also oppose it in our bedrooms. Those who back the Sexual Revolution also favor the Great Replacement. Pick a side, people.

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.