By Michelle Goldberg / The New York Times
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 Donald 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 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,” Kennedy said. “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.”
To hear Republicans talk about it, those convicted under the FACE Act were simply peaceful protesters prosecuted for their beliefs. Court documents suggest otherwise. In the 2020 protest Geraghty took part in, for example, a group of activists shoved their way into the waiting room of the Washington Surgi-Clinic. A nurse sprained her ankle while struggling unsuccessfully to hold the door shut against one of them. Once inside, some of the activists chained themselves together, barricading the doors to the treatment area, while others blocked the entrances. One patient, who’d traveled from Ohio to end her pregnancy after finding out that her fetus had a grave and almost certainly fatal abnormality, had already taken a labor-inducing drug that’s sometimes used in later abortions. She and her husband pleaded with the activists to let them in. Then she collapsed in pain in front of them.
The president’s actions seem likely to encourage more such clinic invasions. This nod-and-wink approach to anti-abortion vigilantism is quintessentially Trumpian, allowing him to cater to his extremist followers while maintaining a veneer of plausible deniability. Abortion divides Trump’s supporters, which is why he pivoted from his most hard-core anti-abortion positions during the last presidential campaign. (“My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights,” he wrote on Truth Social in August.) Were he to suddenly end access to abortion pills, some of his abortion-rights voters might be upset. That doesn’t mean he won’t eventually do it, but it explains why, even as he moves quickly on many other parts of the right’s agenda, he seems to be punting a decision on medication abortion into the future.
While the FACE Act is important to activists, there’s little public awareness of its importance. By undermining it, Trump can reward his base without risking broader backlash. There is something particularly combustible, however, about a situation in which the anti-abortion movement is frustrated on a policy level but given tacit permission to break laws.
The FACE Act wasn’t the only reason that the rescue movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s fell apart, but it played a role. A lot of people involved “dropped out when the FACE Act was hanging over them, because the risks were just too high,” Ziegler said. Before going to prison, Geraghty had been part of a group of people trying to revive such tactics. On Monday, he said he expected the movement to grow. “I can’t answer the question of why rescue is back,” he said, “but it’s back, baby.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2025.
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