Protecting Women’s Rights to Healthcare: RM Mary Gay Scanlon's Opening Remarks on FACE Act

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Well, today is the third time in as many years that this subcommittee under Republican leadership is holding a hearing to undermine the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or the FACE Act. Fourth, if you count the markup of the Chairman's FACE Act Repeal Act last year. Eliminating the FACE Act is a right-wing policy priority drawn directly from the extremist Project 2025 Manifesto, page 558 to be precise. But no matter how many times the enemies of reproductive rights try to rewrite history or drum up new conspiracies about the FACE Act, the facts stay the same. We continue to see criminal obstruction of and threats, intimidation, and violence against abortion providers and women seeking those services. The FACE Act is needed now as much as it has ever been. In 1994, Congress passed the FACE Act with bipartisan support to address rising violence against abortion and reproductive health care providers. Over the years, that violence has included arsons, bombings, chemical attacks, blockades, murders, and attempted murders of abortion providers and bystanders. Specifically, the FACE Act protects the people who work in or seek care at facilities providing access to abortion and other reproductive health care services, as well as places of religious worship. It protects them from the use of force, threats, intimidation, or physical obstruction. But for decades, the same coordinated, extreme, anti-choice forces whose violent conduct created the need for the FACE Act in the first place have tried to undermine the law as part of their unpopular mission to gut access to reproductive health care and effectively ban abortion in the United States. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, anti-abortion extremists have been emboldened, fueling a resurgence of violence and harassment against abortion providers. A report from the National Abortion Federation documented 777 instances of obstruction of clinics in 2024. And in the last two years, there have been 296 incidents of death threats and other threats of violence aimed at abortion providers and their patients. For years, our Republican colleagues have tried to warp reality, and today's hearing is more of the same. They're claiming that people were arrested under the FACE Act for praying. That's just not true. Praying is not unlawful conduct. But you can't mask unlawful conduct, including violent threats or blockading entrances to clinics, with performative prayer. Those threats and physical harassment are crimes, and they jeopardize people's access to potentially life-saving care. Take, for example, one woman's story from Michigan. After struggling with infertility, she finally got pregnant, but at 12 weeks, she and her husband got devastating news. Their baby had an extremely rare abnormality, and he wouldn't survive birth. If she continued the pregnancy, her ability to have children in the future would be at risk, and her life would be at risk as well. So she and her husband made the decision to terminate the pregnancy. On the morning of her appointment at a local reproductive health care clinic, she arrived to find people blocking the entrance. A group approached them, trying to force her to take graphic pamphlets and telling her she could stop a murder from happening. The harassment continued even after the couple moved their car. She and her husband had to leave out of fear for their safety, even though she needed immediate medical attention. They were only able to return after police arrived, arrested the disruptors, and removed them. In another instance, five anti-abortion extremists forced their way into a clinic in Virginia and attempted to grab a patient. The patient's friend had to step in and help the clinic staff usher the invaders out. We're talking about women and their loved ones facing terror, threats of injury, and having to physically fight people off just to receive legal health care for serious medical needs. It shouldn't be that way. That's why we have the FACE Act. But Republicans have seized on a false narrative that the Biden Justice Department selectively enforced the law. That's not true. This month, as Chairman Roy has related, Trump's Department of Justice issued a report claiming that the former administration used the FACE Act to go after allegedly peaceful pro-life protesters. I should note that this report has been variously described across multiple outlets as cherry-picked, shoddy, misleading, hypocritical, inaccurate, incomplete, a distortion of the truth that disregards multiple court rulings and jury verdicts. It parrots long-standing anti-abortion conspiracies, particularly those championed in the Extremist Project 2025 manifesto. There is no credible evidence that prior administrations selectively enforced the FACE Act against anti-abortion protesters. And to the extent that there's any disparity in FACE Act prosecutions of attacks on abortion clinics versus pro-life facilities, it's simply a reflection of the facts. Abortion providers and their patients face significantly higher threats and levels of violence than other entities covered by the statute. The actions of the Trump administration and its right-wing allies, including our Republican colleagues, to undermine the FACE Act have invited anti-abortion extremists to carry out even more dangerous and hostile acts against women seeking health care and their medical providers. And the president's firing of lawyers who prosecuted FACE Act violations, along with pardons for people who were convicted by juries of harassing and attacking abortion providers and their patients, only further emboldens people to commit these crimes. In fact, we've already seen pardoned anti-abortion activists go back to commit similar acts. Last July, six people, two of whom received Trump pardons for FACE Act violations, were arrested after invading a clinic in my district in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. And they've gone on to be arrested again after their plea bargains were affirmed. They lied to get into the Delaware County facility and then harassed patients and staff until the police removed them. If my Republican colleagues want to examine the real dangers of an out-of-control executive using the government to attack its political enemies, they should be holding hearings to examine what the Trump administration is doing right now. How about deploying American troops and armed and masked federal agents to our city streets to shut down opposition and threatening, assaulting, and even killing people who would hold them accountable? How about using warrantless searches to arrest American citizens in their own homes? Or labeling people who disagree with the president's policies as domestic terrorists under NSPM-7, putting their names on secret government lists, and demanding that tech companies hand over the identities of Americans who organize or share their dissenting opinions online? And if we're talking about federal intrusion into areas reserved to the states, how about this administration's attempts to federalize our elections and seize state voter rolls? Why aren't we holding hearings about that? If in politicizing a law meant to keep all Americans safe, anti-abortion extremists are openly attempting to lay the groundwork for a national abortion ban. Their goal is to scare, threaten, and physically obstruct women from accessing reproductive health care. But the majority of Americans agree. All women deserve the freedom to work with their doctors and their families to decide on the health care that is right for them without the meddling of radical politicians or religious extremists. No one should be denied medical care because of someone else's religious or political beliefs. I yield back.