WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – A pro-life father of 11 appeared Wednesday before a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the Biden administration’s use of the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act against peaceful pro-life activists and made the case that his experience amounted to being made a “slave to ideological tyrants.”
The committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government held a hearing titled “Revisiting the Implications of the FACE Act: Part 2,” during which lawmakers and witnesses on both sides weighed in. Among them was Paul Vaughn, the president of Personhood Tennessee.
As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, the Biden Department of Justice (DOJ) charged Vaughn and other pro-lifers with violating FACE during a “rescue” that took place in March 2021 at a Mt. Juliet, Tennessee abortion center.
In October 2022 – more than a year and a half after the peaceful protest, for which nobody in local law enforcement took action against him – the FBI raided Vaughn’s home at gunpoint in front of his wife and young children, some of whom were just leaving for school. The government claimed that he participated in a “conspiracy against rights secured by the FACE Act” even though he never obstructed anyone and was entirely peaceful.
In January 2024, Vaughn and five co-defendants were found guilty on all counts, although in July he was sentenced to three years of supervised release, avoiding the 10 1/2-year prison sentence he had been facing. The Thomas More Society, which is appealing the conviction, maintains that the jury based its erroneous decision in part on the prosecution “attempt(ing) to portray Paul as intending to interfere with the operation of the Mt. Juliet facility using paper-thin evidence, and as a member of a criminal conspiracy, despite no evidence of prior knowledge of the event” (among other deficiencies in the case and while disregarding exculpatory testimony).
During the hearing, after Democrats on the committee linked pro-life activism to the long-since discarded conservative policy agenda Project 2025, Vaughn described his experience as “the DOJ’s Project 2022. It happened October 5 at 7 a.m. in the morning when my house was assaulted, my wife and children were terrorized, and I was kidnapped at gunpoint by four armed men.”
“At the moment of being placed in handcuffs, I became a slave to ideological tyrants, either the ones holding the weapons or the ones they obeyed,” he declared.
Vaughn stressed that while some participants of the rescue had been arrested for sitting in entrances, “the fact remains that I did not do any of these things. I did nothing that was outside constitutionally protected free speech and religious freedom. I did nothing that day that I’ve not done many times since FACE was passed in 1994. I did not sit in, I broke no laws, federal or local, and I was not arrested the day of the event. But yes, Member (Mary Gay) Scanlon (D-PA), I did pray that day. I had talked with the police chief, the lead negotiating team. I helped the police and the pro-lifers by messaging back and forth. A police spokesperson complimented us on the peaceful nature of the event on the evening news. The lead negotiator testified for us in our federal trial.”
Vaughn took the opportunity to point out that while “all people of honor and character denounce acts of violence on either side of this issue,” the conversation about abortion-related violence neglects the violence of abortion itself, the violence of fathers and other family members who want to pressure women into aborting their children, and violence by pro-abortion activists.
“There is no legitimate reason for (the FACE Act) to remain on the books,” he argued, especially now that the U.S. Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the federal “right” the law was meant to protect at the federal level. “There is nothing that the FACE Act does that is not already accomplished by state laws across the land. If abortion is returned to the states, then so should the laws governing it.”
Democrat committee members Scanlon and Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) went on to insinuate that Vaughn was indeed guilty of instruction, albeit without engaging his version of events in any depth. “I was not sitting at any door, I was not standing in any door, at no time did I block anyone,” Vaughn reiterated in response to Nadler. “My only activities were praying and talking with police officers and relaying messages back and forth between the two parties.”
Thomas More attorney Steve Crampton also testified, reiterating that that the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling effectively gutted the FACE Act’s rationale for existing, yet rather than winding down the Biden administration dramatically increased its application.
Enacted in 1994, the FACE Act ostensibly protects access to facilities run by both pro-life and pro-abortion organizations, including abortion facilities, pro-life pregnancy centers, and churches. However, conservatives have argued that the Department of Justice under the Biden administration has weaponized the act to prosecute pro-life activists while only a handful of pro-abortion vandals have been arrested after a string of attacks on churches and pro-life centers in the wake of Dobbs.
Among the most egregious Biden prosecutions have been the so-called DC Nine who entered an abortion center in the nation’s capital and refused to leave in 2022, and who received prison time despite several of them being elderly with medical issues. Also concerning was the case of Mark Houck, a Philadelphia pro-lifer whom the DOJ prosecuted under the FACE Act after arresting in a morning FBI raid for a physical altercation with a hostile abortion supporter that local authorities had already dismissed. Houck was acquitted in January 2023.
Returning President Donald Trump pledged on the campaign trail to “review the cases of every political prisoner … unjustly persecuted by the Biden administration” and “sign their pardons or commutation on Day One.” Last month, federal Judge Matthew Leitman paused the sentencing of seven Michigan pro-lifers until after Trump returns to office in anticipation of a new DOJ reversing the Biden position on the prosecutions.
To prevent a future administration from renewing similar prosecutions against pro-lifers, Republicans led by U.S. Rep. Chip Roy of Texas are urging Congress to take up a bill to repeal the FACE Act.