Paulette Harlow doesn’t know how President Donald Trump came to know her name.
He had mentioned her both during his presidential campaign last year and in his video message played at the March for Life rally in Washington Jan. 24.
On Jan. 23, the president pardoned Harlow and 22 other pro-life activists convicted of violating the federal Freedom of Access to Clinics Act, or FACE Act.
The Kingston, Massachusetts, resident – a mother of six, grandmother of eight and a Secular Franciscan – figured Trump likely got her name from a court document handed to him at the White House, since he called her Paula. That was the result of a long-standing error in Justice Department documents that recorded her first name as Paula Paulette.
None of that mattered, though, when she saw the news on TV at her home.
“I got a little choked up. It was very nice,” Harlow told OSV News.
She was on house arrest, finishing up a two-year sentence she received in federal court last year for her participation in an abortion clinic blockade in Washington in 2020.
“I could go to my dentist appointments, but that’s it,” she said.
Harlow was one of 10 convicted in the best-known of three clinic blockade cases, since it was led by Lauren Handy, who received the longest prison sentence of any of them – 57 months. Handy, a Catholic, was incarcerated in Florida when pardoned. The other cases stemmed from clinic blockades in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, and Sterling Heights, Michigan.
Now, Harlow is looking forward to spending time with her grandchildren, and best of all, attending Mass at Saints Mary & Joseph Collaborative in nearby Plymouth.
As for more pro-life protesting, “I have no idea. Wherever God leads us,” she said.
Trump’s pardons marked the end of a legal saga that began in 2022.
That year, a Justice Department task force, in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning the Roe v. Wade decision, asked federal attorneys to charge activists who blockaded abortion clinics or otherwise interfered with access with violating the FACE Act even if they had already been previously been convicted for trespassing at the clinics.
The act, enacted in 1994, classifies blocking clinic entrances, or interfering with clinic patients, as a felony, with penalties of up to 10 years imprisonment along with substantial fines.
Pro-life activists immediately began accusing the department of weaponized prosecutions.
The outcome was entirely in their favor. In addition to the pardons, the Justice Department announced it had dropped prosecutions of civil suits filed in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
As for the FACE Act, on Jan. 24, the Justice Department ordered federal prosecutors to cease enforcement of that law barring “extraordinary circumstances” or in cases presenting “significant aggravating factors.” There were only two FACE Act prosecutions during Trump’s first term, both involving attempted clinic bombings, and those ended in plea deals.
Some of the 23 pardoned had past experience in the “rescue” movement of the 1980s. The best-known of those was Joan Andrews Bell, an activist since the Supreme Court legalized abortion nationwide in 1973. Some of the others still face legal challenges related to their protests.
In addition to Harlow and Bell, both Catholics, OSV News spoke with four others who received pardons, three of whom are Catholics, and settled for an email from Father Fidelis Moscinski, a Franciscan Friar of the Renewal from the Bronx, New York, who had received a six-month federal sentence in 2023 for blocking clinic access in Hempstead, New York.
The priest, who has been in and out of jail over the years for his activities at clinics, never talks to the media. So OSV News asked for an email instead, receiving this:
“Without getting into any specifics, I plan on carrying forward my pro-life ministry. I shall continue to be guided by these words from Proverbs 24:11: ‘Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter.’”
The others all expressed thanks to Trump. All are resuming their lives with some expressing relief that they had made it through incarceration as well as they had.
Jean Marshall, Harlow’s sister and also a Secular Franciscan, was serving a two-year sentence and learned of the pardons on TV while at a halfway house in Boston. “I was just elated that I could watch it. It’s pretty sensational when you’re pardoned on TV.”
With a bad hip, her incarceration was painful anytime she was taken in the shackles required for federal prisoners, and the judge refused to let her have hip surgery. She suffers from several ailments, including diabetes and fibromyalgia.
But Marshall said her activism is undimmed. “I will continue to fight for the rights of the unborn, and to help women.”
William Goodman tells you straight off that he’s been homeless since 2017. He has a car, but rather than living out of it, he finds lodging at monasteries and rectories or brief stays with friends, which brought him to the Harlow home. He refers to himself as a “digital nomad,” accustomed to that lifestyle. He expects to return to Illinois soon to visit his parents.
Goodman was serving a 27-month sentence for the Washington blockade, which was to be followed by three years of supervised release, at the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, living in one big dormitory room holding 80 men considered non-violent offenders.
He found that one rule of prison decorum involved never asking anyone else what they were in for. No one has to. Many inmates had friends on the outside who would conduct online searches so they could conclude he was not a threat, or incarcerated for a sexual offense against children. These convicted sex abusers are considered the lowest of the low behind bars and prone to being assaulted.
He had one mishap, though, falling out of his top bunk and getting a concussion. He quickly got help from his bunkmate, Big Nick, who he learned was pro-life, and from a Jan. 6 convict who was also later pardoned by Trump.
Goodman’s plans are less certain. “I’ll be honest, I just like ... to see the sky, go to Mass, eat normal food.” He intends to “pray for those in the culture of death.”
Bell called OSV News after returning from daily Mass with husband Chris in Montague, New Jersey. He is president and executive director of the New Jersey-based Good Counsel Homes for unwed mothers.
She learned of her pardon right after praying her 7 p.m. rosary in the federal detention center in Philadelphia, where she was finishing out her 27-month sentence for the Washington blockade. She was able to leave quickly enough to join the March for Life the following day, where more than a dozen of the pardoned activists gathered to celebrate.
Adjustment to incarceration was not made easier by her experiences of years ago, but she quickly found her niche in the Alexandria, Virginia, detention center, where she was held for the first nine months, by organizing small groups to pray the daily Rosary. They were more difficult to arrange in Philadelphia, but she said she eventually persevered with the prison staff.
A Russian prisoner, Bell recalled, observed, “You are really happy to be here. You must really be happy.” She responded, “I am happy. I’m doing God’s work.”
She plans to return to praying outside abortion clinics with members of the Apostolate of Gloria Dei.
“I’m just thrilled,” Bell said about her freedom, and she’s been busy teaching her nine grandchildren, none older than 7, how to pray.
Paul Vaughn of Centerville, Tennessee, an evangelical, is the president of Personhood Tennessee and the father of 11 children, ages 3 to 29. He was one of 11 sentenced in Nashville for the Mount Juliet clinic blockade, completed six months of house arrest on Jan. 2 and had begun three years of supervised release.
It was onerous. “Going to the parole office, reporting our income every month, unable to leave the (U.S. Attorney’s Office for the) Middle District of Tennessee.”
Plus, “there’s no way to get restitution for the persecution that was brought against us.”
Vaughn and the others, represented by the Thomas More Society, the Chicago-based public interest law firm, are not yet done with the FACE Act. The plan is to appeal both that law and the 1870 civil rights act under which many activists were prosecuted for “deprivation of rights,” which added additional time to their sentences.
The goal is to get the FACE Act overturned in the Supreme Court. Currently, Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican, has introduced a bill in Congress to get the law repealed, but its prospects are uncertain.
“We’re committed to right the wrong, and to take that tool away from them in the future,” Vaughn said.
As for the pardon itself, which he had hoped for, “that’s a nice novelty to put on a resume, I guess,” he said. “You don’t go through something like this and have your life go back to normal.”
Monica Miller, who heads the Michigan-based Citizens for a Pro-Life Society, the organization behind Red Rose Rescue, was relieved to have the civil suit against her group, which was brought by federal prosecutors in Ohio, dropped. But she, too, faces more legal hurdles.
New York State Attorney General Letitia James has filed a contempt motion against a member of Red Rose Rescue for violating a 15-foot buffer zone at Planned Parenthood clinics in Manhattan and Brooklyn. “That’s one of the last things we have to deal with,” Miller said.
Sidewalk counseling is the last legal battleground for pro-life activists, and the Supreme Court is considering whether to take up two cases involving so-called “abortion bubbles” that could allow protesters to get as close as 8 feet away from women entering clinics.
