Meet The Pro-Life Activists Set Free By Trump’s Pardons

Authored by Sam Dorman & Samantha Flom via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Joan Bell had just finished saying her second group rosary of the day when a fellow inmate ran into her Philadelphia prison cell and delivered unexpected news.

“‘Miss Joan’s husband’s on TV! She’s been pardoned,’” Bell, 76, recounted to The Epoch Times.

Bell, who has been dubbed the matriarch of pro-life activism, has been to jail multiple times for “rescues”—the pro-life term for entering an abortion clinic and potentially blocking entrances in hopes of stopping procedures from occurring. This time, the president of the United States granted her a pardon.

“I didn’t think it was going to happen,” Bell said, referring to the pardon. She said she was grateful to President Donald Trump for his “great, great kindness.”

While in prison, Bell and a group of other inmates would perform Mass prayers from a missalette daily in both English and Spanish. Two groups would also pray the rosary in both languages.

She had already served more than a year in prison for an October 2020 protest at the Washington Surgi-Clinic, located in the nation’s capital.

Bell, who received a sentence of 27 months, was one of 23 pro-life activists prosecuted under the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. Trump pardoned each of them just three days after he was sworn in as president.

The Justice Department had also leveled charges under a conspiracy against rights statute, which was part of a post-Civil War law targeting groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Combined, the two laws resulted in multiple defendants receiving years-long sentences. By the time Trump issued the pardons, many had already been incarcerated for more than a year.

“They should not have been prosecuted,” Trump said before signing the pardons in the Oval Office on Jan. 23. “This is a great honor to sign this.”

From Rescued to Rescuer

Eva Edl said she could not recall who told her she had been pardoned, but she did remember her first thought.

“Praise the Lord!” she told The Epoch Times.

Edl, 89, was facing what she said “would have been a death sentence”—more than 10 years in prison for blocking the entrances to two Michigan abortion clinics. That possibility has now been erased, along with the three years of probation she was sentenced to in September 2024 for her involvement in a similar protest in Mount Juliet, Tennessee.

As a veteran abortion “rescuer,” Edl has been participating in clinic blockades since the late 1980s.

She said the government has no business deciding who lives or dies. And as the survivor of a Soviet concentration camp, she said she knows firsthand what happens when government “usurps the right” to make that determination, as her native Yugoslavian government once did.

As a little girl, Edl watched the Soviets round up her family members. Her older siblings were forced to work in a labor camp, while she and her grandmother were sent where those deemed too weak to work went—to an extermination camp.

“I was only 9 years old, so I was placed in a cattle car like cattle—standing room only, where you nearly died from lack of air,” Edl said.

It was at that concentration camp that Edl found Jesus, she said, and that faith carried her through until she was rescued by her mother, who bribed a guard to allow her to escape. She immigrated to Austria and then to the United States, where she was shocked to learn about abortion.

In 1988, Edl became involved with pro-life activism after learning of demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta.

“I told my husband, ‘Sweetheart, this is what somebody should have done for me. May I go?’ And he let me go,” Edl said.

Edl has been arrested dozens of times for her involvement in various pro-life protests. In her eyes, the abortion clinic is no different from the concentration camp where she was held.

“I see the sidewalk as the train tracks and the entrance to the abortion clinic as the gates to the death camp,” she told The Epoch Times. She said she wonders what might have happened if someone had blocked her train and helped her to escape.

“Somehow, another group of Christians could have come and pried open my cattle car and saved us, or at least given us a chance to be saved,” she said. “This is how I see what I’m doing now.”

The Battle Continues

Questions remain as to whether Bell, Edl, and other activists will face legal consequences for future protests.

That is why Edl and 11 of her co-defendants are calling on the president to push for the repeal of the FACE Act.

“This law was always meant to be partial toward injustice,” they wrote in a Jan. 29 letter obtained by The Epoch Times. “It was meant from the beginning to persecute pro-life Christians who love their neighbors.”

They also urged Trump to support a federal abortion ban. “Neither a heartbeat, brainwaves, viability, or other objective measurements of development determine the worth of a human being,” the letter states.

The letter’s other signatories include Dr. Coleman Boyd, Cal Zastrow, Dennis Green, Eva Zastrow, Jim Zastrow, Heather Idoni, Chester Gallagher, Paul Place, and Paul Vaughn—each of whom were charged after a protest in Tennessee. Justin Phillips and Joel Curry, who were indicted in Michigan, also signed it.

Vaughn, who was under house arrest, is hoping that the pardon he received will not render moot his pending appeal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. The Justice Department filed a motion on Jan. 28 to vacate Vaughn’s and others’ convictions, as well as to remand the case for dismissal at the district court level.

Read the rest here…