Pro-life activists sentenced over abortion clinic blockades in Tennessee

(OSV News) -- The felony sentencing of four pro-life activists for participating in a 2021 blockade of a Mount Juliet, Tennessee, abortion clinic marks nearly the end of the second of three federal trials for abortion clinic blockades this year.

Only one of the four, Calvin Zastrow, 57, of Kawkalin, Michigan, who describes himself as "a pro-life missionary," received a prison term of six months, with three years of supervised release.

The others, sentenced July 2-3 in U.S. District Court in Nashville for violating the Federal Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE Act, were: Coleman Boyd, 51, of Bolton, Mississippi, five years of probation and a $10,000 fine; Paul Vaughn, 55, of Centerville, Tennessee, time served and three years of supervised release; and Dennis Green, 56, of Cumberland, Virginia, time served and three years of supervised release.

Both probationary and supervised-release sentences mandate six months of home confinement.

Six others convicted of misdemeanors for the blockade at a carafem abortion clinic on March 5, 2021, will be sentenced July 30. The nonprofit carafem runs several clinics around the country.

All of the activists are evangelicals. Vaughn is the president of Personhood Tennessee and the father of 11 children; Boyd, a family physician who livestreamed the blockade on Facebook, is a member of Operation Save America; Green, a bookstore owner, is the director of Life and Liberty Ministries and the father of 12.

The Thomas More Society, the Chicago-based public interest firm representing Vaughn, announced that it will file an appeal. Steve Crampton, Vaughn's attorney, said in a statement that "it remains the case that his conviction is a deep injustice."

Sentencing for two other defendants was delayed pending their upcoming trials for a clinic blockade in Sterling Heights, Michigan, in 2020.

Chester Gallagher, 73, of Lebanon, Tennessee, accused by prosecutors of organizing the Mount Juliet blockade, is scheduled to be sentenced Sept. 26. Heather Idoni, 59, a former bookstore owner from Linden, Michigan, is scheduled to be sentenced Sept. 27.

Idoni, who is serving a two-year sentence for her participation in a 2020 blockade of Washington Surgi-Clinic in Washington, is the only person who has been charged in three blockades. She has been accused of organizing the one in Sterling Heights.

At sentencing, U.S. District Judge Aleta Trauger acknowledged the defendants' good works in their communities, but said their religious beliefs did not justify breaking the law.

Green, at sentencing, told Trauger, "We refuse to prop up the charade that killing one's child is a civil or human right."

Among others facing trial in Michigan are Eva Zastrow, 24, of Dover, Arkansas, the daughter of Calvin Zastrow, and Eva Edl, 89, of Aiken, South Carolina, a longtime pro-life activist who first participated in an Operation Rescue blockade in Atlanta in 1988.

The Justice Department is also seeking steep fines and penalties against seven pro-life activists involved in blockades at two abortion clinics in Ohio in June 2021.

Defendants in that include the Michigan-based Citizens for a Pro-Life Society and Red Rose Rescue, an affiliated group, as well as Monica Miller of South Lyon, Michigan, who heads CPLS; Lauren Handy of Alexandria, Virginia; Father Fidelis Moscinski of the Bronx, New York; and Jay Smith of Freeport, New York.

Handy, a Catholic, is currently serving a nearly five-year prison sentence, the longest of any defendant, for her role in the 2020 blockade in Washington.

Prosecutors seek civil penalties against most defendants of $20,516 and a higher penalty of $30,868 for defendants such as Handy who have previously been convicted of violating the FACE Act. Prosecutors also are seeking damages in the amount of $5,000 for each person whose clinic appointments were disrupted or delayed.

The Catholic Church opposes abortion because it holds that all human life is sacred from conception to natural death. However, the church also makes clear that all advocacy for justice must use only moral means, with St. John Paul II teaching in his 1993 encyclical, "Veritatis Splendor," that a person cannot "intend directly something which of its very nature contradicts the moral order ... even though the intention is to protect or promote the welfare of an individual, of a family or of society in general."