A federal jury this week convicted seven pro-life advocates of federal felony civil rights offenses for blocking the entrance of an abortion center in Sterling Heights in 2020.
Two of the seven were also convicted of felonies for the same at an abortion clinic in Saginaw a year later.
“These defendants orchestrated an unlawful clinic blockade and physically obstructed patients seeking access to their doctors, without regard to the serious medical needs of the women they blocked from accessing reproductive health care,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
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“These defendants intentionally broke the law. One woman’s fetus experienced fatal abnormalities and the defendants’ coordinated campaign of physical obstruction posed a grave and real threat to her health and fertility.”
Prosecutors argued at trial that Calvin Zastrow, Chester Gallagher, Heather Idoni, Caroline Davies, Joel Curry, Justin Phillips, Eva Edl and Eva Zastrow violated the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act by blocking patients and employees from the Sterling Heights clinic.
The incident was part of a “Michigan Holiness Revival Tour” organized by Zastrow that involved the defendants sitting or standing in front of the clinic’s entrance.
“Evidence at trial further proved that the defendants blocked a patient, S.S., from entering. The evidence showed that S.S. and her husband had made an appointment at the clinic after learning that their fetus suffered fatal abnormalities, and that attempting to continue carrying the pregnancy carried serious risks to S.S.’s health and fertility,” according to a statement from the Justice Department.
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Prosecutors also said Calvin and Eva Zastrow blocked a clinic employee from entering through an emergency exit, and Gallagher and Edl attempted to stall police once they arrived.
The jury also heard evidence that Edl and Idoni blocked access to a different clinic in Saginaw in April 2021 using a doorstop wedged under the door and a bicycle lock chained to another.
The felony conspiracy charges carry up to 10 years in prison and fines of up to $260,000, according to an Associated Press report on the same charges in a case in Tennessee. In that case, 11 people were convicted for barricading an abortion center in Mount Juliet in 2021 in a protest that was also organized by Zastrow, who was sentenced to 6 months in prison and three years of supervised release in July.
In Michigan, defense attorneys requested U.S. District Judge Matthew Lietman dismiss the conspiracy charge, noting it’s based on an 1870 federal law intended to prevent the Ku Klux Klan from violating the rights of Blacks, CBS News reports.
“The Department of Justice’s novel strategy to inflict maximize pain upon peaceful pro-lifers by adding a charge … cannot be squared with the law and we stand ready to make that case,” attorney Steve Crampton said.
Leitman said he would consider the request in the coming months, according to the news site.
It’s unclear when the defendants will be sentenced. The Justice Department contends a “hearing will be set at a later date.”
The case was investigated by the FBI’s Detroit Field Office and Bay City Resident Agency.
“My office is committed to protecting all of the legal rights of our district’s citizens, including the right to access reproductive health care,” U.S. Attorney Dawn Ison for the Eastern District of Michigan said on Tuesday. “The defendants convicted today sought to interfere with that right by physically blocking the doors of clinics providing such services. These defendants are entitled to their views, but they are not entitled to prevent others from exercising the rights secured to them by the laws of the United States.”
The case is the third major trial in the past two years of pro-life advocates charged with violations of the FACE Act, which adopted in 1994 to prohibit obstruction or intimidation at both abortion clinics and pregnancy resource centers that counsel against abortion, Detroit Catholic reports.
All of the defendants in all three trials were convicted, with the longest sentence imposed so far of 57 months. That sentence was for Lauren Handy, a 31-year-old Catholic pro-life activist from Virginia who was convicted in 2023 of blocking the entrance of a Washington abortion clinic in 2020.
The Thomas More Society, a religious liberty law firm based in Chicago, plans to appeal Gallagher’s conspiracy charge, citing the recent Supreme Court decision in Fischer v. United States that narrowed the interpretation of “obstructive conduct” in a case involving the events of Jan. 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol, according to Detroit Catholic.
Last year, Michigan set a 30-year record for the number of abortions performed in the state: 31,241.