[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Live Action News.]
By Nancy Flanders
Live Action News
During a June 22 speech to the Faith and Freedom Coalition, former President Donald Trump said that if elected to the presidency again, he would pardon the pro-life activists currently serving jail time for a sit-in style protest at an infamous late abortion facility in Washington, D.C.
As reported by the Catholic News Agency, during his speech, Trump specifically mentioned one of the activists, 75-year-old Paulette Harlow, who was sentenced to 24 months in prison for conspiracy to violate civil rights and violation of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. Harlow had been on house arrest due to poor health following her November 2023 conviction, but Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly sentenced her to serve out the remainder of her 24-month sentence in federal prison, followed by 36 months of supervised release.
“Paulette is one of many peaceful pro-lifers who Joe Biden has rounded up, sometimes with SWAT teams, and thrown them in jail,” said Trump. “Many people are in jail over this. …We’re going to get that taken care of immediately — first day.”
He continued by saying he would “rapidly review the cases of every political prisoner who’s unjustly victimized by the Biden regime, including Paulette, so we can get them out of the gulags and back to their families where they belong.”
Harlow is one of nine pro-life activists currently imprisoned after being found guilty of conspiring to violate civil rights and blocking access to notorious abortionist Cesare Santangelo’s Washington, D.C., abortion business in October of 2020. They are said to have used chains, bike locks, furniture, and their bodies to prevent abortions from being committed and to prevent police from removing them from the premises. These are common protest tactics used today and in decades past.
Santangelo’s facility has been at the center of scandal multiple times. On March 25, 2022, two pro-life activists, PAAU Founder and Executive Director Terrisa Bukovinac and PAAU Director of Activism Lauren Handy, went to Santangelo’s Washington Surgi-Clinic “to engage in anti-abortion advocacy.” While there, a truck from Curtis Bay Medical Waste Services was parked outside and they noticed two large boxes marked with biohazard symbols next to the truck. They asked the driver for one of the boxes, and when they opened it, they discovered a red plastic bag inside containing the remains of 110 aborted babies, mostly of first-trimester age. Under that was a plastic bag containing five babies whom experts have stated were killed when they were likely old enough to have survived outside the womb. Washington, D.C. has no restrictions on abortion.
One of the babies, whom activists have since named “Harriet,” had an incision on the back of her neck that experts said could indicate the use of the federally banned D&X abortion procedure — more commonly known as ‘partial-birth abortion’.
Other babies found in the bag could have been killed by infanticide after surviving the abortion procedure, according to experts. In a 2013 Live Action undercover investigation, which inspired Handy to protest at this specific facility, Santangelo said on film that his method of killing preborn babies does not involve the use of an injected feticide, but instead, he severs the umbilical cord and waits for the child to die by cardiac arrest. He also said if a child survived an abortion at his facility, he and his staff “would not help it” with medical care.
Two of the babies discovered that day appeared to have been killed by D&E dismemberment abortions, in which the abortionist used a Sopher clamp to rip their arms and legs off and pull the babies out of the womb in pieces.
A few months after these babies were found, Live Action released new undercover footage from inside Santangelo’s facility. The footage shows that the abortion business requires pregnant women to take Xanax, a medication that can cause drowsiness and impair memory, before meeting with the abortionist and giving final consent for an abortion.
[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Live Action News.]
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