Following a peaceful demonstration at an abortion clinic in 2020, 75-year-old Paulette Harlow, a mother of six and grandmother of eight with a debilitating medical condition, was just sentenced to two years – perhaps the rest of her life – behind bars as part of a ruthless crackdown on pro-life activists by the Biden Department of Justice. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has taken no action against the Hamas sympathizers who have illegally blocked highways and harassed Jewish Americans, the pro-abortion extremists who torched and vandalized churches and pregnancy centers, or the left-wing rioters who terrorized America’s cities and inflicted more than $1 billion in damage in 2020.
Harlow was charged and convicted for allegedly violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a 1994 law which is supposed to equally protect the right of pro-life and pro-abortion advocates to peacefully demonstrate. The law also outlines punishment guidelines for anyone who physically prevents someone from accessing an abortion clinic or religious building or intentionally damages such institutions.
In practice, however, the law has been weaponized by Democrat prosecutors and judges to target pro-life activists while allowing pro-abortion radicals free reign to intimidate and harass pro-lifers and target pro-life centers and churches.
As video of Harlow’s alleged crime shows, she and eight others were peacefully praying outside an abortion clinic in Washington D.C. when they were arrested. The Biden DOJ subsequently charged all nine defendants with a “conspiracy” to block pregnant women from accessing the abortion clinic.
Harlow was the final defendant in the case to receive a sentence. Joan Bell, 76, received 27 months behind bars. Jean Marshall, 74, also received a two-year sentence. Lauren Handy, whom the DOJ charged as the leader of the “conspiracy,” will spend almost five years in federal prison followed by three years of supervised release.
The protest in question took place at the clinic of a particularly notorious D.C. abortionist who has been accused of murdering full-term, viable infants and also leaving living babies to die. Handy’s group, Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, retrieved the bodies of at least five aborted babies from the trash outside the same clinic which they claim showed evidence of illegal late-term, partial-birth, and even so-called “post-birth” abortions (infanticide). The D.C. police and Biden DOJ both refused to further investigate the apparently obvious evidence that the clinic had broken the law.
Harlow’s sentencing in particular has exposed the cruel and vindictive nature of the Biden administration’s crackdown on pro-life activists and ignited backlash within the pro-life community. According to reporting from inside the courtroom, when her husband, John, begged Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly for leniency given Harlow’s declining health, the judge, a Bill Clinton nominee, instead mocked Harlow’s faith.
“In my heart, I think she’s having a hard time staying alive,” John said, according to LiveAction. “We’ve tried to be good people,” he later added. “I love my wife dearly… We’re throwing ourselves on the mercy of the court.”
But Kollar-Kotelly handed down a two-year sentence anyway, coldly commenting that she believes Harlow will “make an effort to remain alive” because that is a “tenet of her religion.”
Harlow and her alleged “co-conspirators” are hardly the first pro-lifers to be targeted by the Biden administration. Back in 2022, Biden’s FBI conducted a dawn raid on the home of Mark Houck, a father of seven, for defending his son from a violent pro-abortion activist outside an abortion clinic in October 2021. A jury subsequently acquitted Houck, and he has since sued the Biden administration.
The harsh treatment received by Harlow, Houck, and other pro-lifers at the hands of the Biden administration, Democrat prosecutors, and liberal judges presents a stark contrast to the leniency shown to left-wing activists guilty of far more violent acts.
Perhaps the most glaring example of this hypocrisy is the Biden administration’s failure to prosecute those responsible for burning and vandalizing churches and pro-life pregnancy centers following the Dobbs Supreme Court decision in May 2022, which reversed Roe v. Wade.
As Mary Margaret Olohan has reported for The Daily Signal, since then there have been “at least 236 attacks on Catholic churches and at least 90 attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers.” But despite this alarming rise in attacks, the Biden administration has charged just five individuals with FACE Act violations for targeting pro-life centers.
The Biden administration also reportedly explicitly told law enforcement to not arrest the pro-abortion protestors demonstrating outside the homes of conservative Supreme Court justices – despite multiple death threats against the justices and the fact that such protests are a clear violation of federal law.
More recently, even while pursuing charges against elderly peaceful protestors like Harlow, Biden’s DOJ has looked the other way as pro-Hamas rioters have shut down major highways and airports – another blatant violation of federal law.
Following the Black Lives Matter riots in 2020 which caused an estimated $1-2 billion in damage and left at least 20 Americans dead, the Biden administration also largely failed to hold any of the left-wing criminals accountable. Even those who were arrested often received shorter sentences than the ones Harlow and other pro-life activists now face. For instance, Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman, who used Molotov cocktails to torch an NYPD car in May 2020, received sentences of just 12 and 15 months, respectively.
Yet as these actual criminals walk free or escape with shockingly light punishments relative to the violent nature of their crimes, individuals like Harlow will languish in prison for daring to defend unborn life and pray for pregnant mothers – such is the moral perversion of Joe Biden’s America.
Shane Harris is a writer and political consultant from Southwest Ohio. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.
