Three days after getting out of federal prison for his role in forcibly shutting down a reproductive health clinic in Washington, D.C., Herb Geraghty, one of 23 anti-abortion activists pardoned by President Trump last week, was eager to return to protesting. “I’m planning to run by an abortion clinic as soon as I get the opportunity and participate in some peaceful sidewalk advocacy,” he told me on Monday.
Geraghty, 29, hoped that the new administration would, by restricting abortion, eventually make the sort of radical action that led to his conviction unnecessary. But he was skeptical that Trump would fulfill the anti-abortion movement’s sweeping ambitions. “It would be great if we didn’t have to do so much, but my bet is that we will,” he said. So in the coming years, he expects abortion activists to launch “more direct action, putting our bodies on the line between the victim and the oppressor, regardless of what the consequences might be.”
In his first days in office, Trump hasn’t made curtailing abortion a major priority. His Justice Department has not, so far, acceded to requests from the anti-abortion movement to declare the mailing of abortion pills illegal under the 19th-century Comstock Act, though that could easily change. At his confirmation hearing on Wednesday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services, left the door open to restricting the abortion-inducing drug mifepristone, which the anti-abortion movement claims, falsely, is unsafe. But he didn’t promise to move right away. “President Trump has asked me to study the safety of mifepristone,” said Kennedy. “He has not yet taken a stand on how to regulate it.”
What the president has done, however, is create a newly indulgent environment for activists like Geraghty, who use their bodies to try to physically disrupt clinic operations. Shortly after pardoning the anti-abortion demonstrators, Trump’s Justice Department announced that it plans to stop enforcing the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, or FACE, Act, except in “extraordinary circumstances” or where there are “significant aggravating factors.” That law was passed in 1994 in response to a spate of violence ranging from mass abortion clinic blockades — participants called them “rescues” — to an assassination of an abortion provider. Among other things, FACE made it a federal crime to use physical force to intimidate or obstruct those seeking to provide or obtain abortions, or to intentionally damage an abortion clinic. “There’s a message being sent that there is no legal risk anymore to doing the kinds of things that the FACE Act says are illegal,” said Mary Ziegler, a legal scholar and the author of the forthcoming book “Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction.”
