Pro-life Leaders Urge House GOP to Repeal FACE Act

A group of pro-life leaders wrote a letter urging House Republican leadership to take up legislation to repeal the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, more commonly known as the FACE Act.

The letter, headed up by conservative group Advancing American Freedom and first obtained by The Daily Signal, asks House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, to take up legislation that would repeal the FACE Act, a law that outlaws the use of force or threats to prevent someone from accessing an abortion facility.

“In the aftermath of additional pro-life activists being convicted by the Biden administration under the FACE Act for peacefully protesting outside an abortion business, we respectfully urge you to take immediate legislative action to protect peaceful pro-life activists from the Biden administration’s weaponized Department of Justice and an unconstitutional law,” the letter reads.

“We believe that the FACE Act is unconstitutional,” the letter continues. “It wrongly usurps police powers reserved to the states by the Constitution and allows the Department of Justice to swoop in to punish its political enemies, rather than equally applying the law. Additionally, the FACE Act protects abortion, when taking the life of the unborn is no longer and never rightly was a constitutional right.”

The letter also noted that the law “was never used by the federal government to protect a pro-life pregnancy center or a church” and has been used almost exclusively to prosecute pro-lifers.

Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, introduced legislation to repeal the law in September 2023. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, introduced a similar bill in the Senate. The letter urges Johnson and Jordan to schedule Roy’s bill, the FACE Act Repeal Act of 2023, for consideration in the House Judiciary Committee, and then for the House to consider and pass the bill afterward.