Joan Bell had just finished her second group Rosary of the day when a fellow inmate ran into the Philadelphia prison cell and delivered unexpected news.
“‘Miss Joan’s husband’s on TV! She’s been pardoned,’” Bell, 76, recounted to The Epoch Times.
Bell, who has been dubbed the matriarch of pro-life activism, has been to jail multiple times for “rescues”—the pro-life term for entering an abortion clinic and potentially blocking entrances in hopes of stopping procedures from occuring. This time, the president of the United States granted her a pardon.
“I didn’t think it was going to happen,” Bell said, referring to the pardon. She added that she was grateful to Trump for his “great, great kindness.”
While in prison, Bell and a group of other inmates would perform Mass prayers from a missalette daily in both English and Spanish. Two groups would also pray the Rosary in both languages.
She had already served more than a year in prison for an October 2020 protest at the Washington Surgi-Clinic, located in the nation’s capital.
Bell, who received a sentence of 27 months, was one of 23 pro-life activists prosecuted under the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. Trump pardoned each of them just three days after he was sworn in as president.
The Justice Department had also leveled charges under a conspiracy against rights statute, which was part of a post-Civil War law targeting groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Combined, the two laws resulted in multiple defendants receiving yearslong sentences. By the time Trump issued the pardons, many had already been incarcerated for more than a year.
“They should not have been prosecuted,” Trump said before signing the pardons in the Oval Office on Jan. 23. “This is a great honor to sign this.”
From Rescued to Rescuer
Eva Edl couldn’t recall who told her she had been pardoned, but she did remember her first thought.
“Praise the Lord!” she told The Epoch Times.
Edl, 89, was facing what she said “would have been a death sentence”—more than 10 years in prison for blocking the entrances to two Michigan abortion clinics. That possibility has now been erased, along with the three years of probation she was sentenced to in September 2024 for her involvement in a similar protest in Mount Juliet, Tennessee.
As a veteran abortion “rescuer,” Edl has been participating in clinic blockades since the late 1980s.
She says the government has no business deciding who lives or dies. And as the survivor of a Soviet concentration camp, she knows firsthand what happens when government “usurps the right” to make that determination, as her native Yugoslavian government once did.
As a little girl, Edl watched the Soviets round up her family members. Her older siblings were forced to work in a labor camp, while she and her grandmother were sent where those deemed too weak to work went—to an extermination camp.
“I was only 9 years old, so I was placed in a cattle car like cattle—standing room only, where you nearly died from lack of air,” Edl said.
It was at that concentration camp that Edl found Jesus, she said, and that faith carried her through until she was rescued by her mother, who bribed a guard to allow her escape. She immigrated to Austria and then to the United States, where she was shocked to learn about abortion.
In 1988, Edl became involved with pro-life activism after learning of demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta.
“I told my husband, ‘Sweetheart, this is what somebody should have done for me. May I go?’ And he let me go.”
Edl has been arrested dozens of times for her involvement in various pro-life protests. In her eyes, the abortion clinic is no different from the concentration camp where she was held.
“I see the sidewalk as the train tracks and the entrance to the abortion clinic as the gates to the death camp,” she said, wondering what might have happened if someone had blocked her train and helped her to escape.
“Somehow, another group of Christians could have come and pried open my cattle car and saved us, or at least given us a chance to be saved. This is how I see what I’m doing now.”
The Battle Continues
Questions remain as to whether Bell, Edl, and other activists will face legal consequences for future protests.
That’s why Edl and 11 of her co-defendants are calling on the president to push for the repeal of the FACE Act.
“This law was always meant to be partial toward injustice,” they wrote in a Jan. 29 letter obtained by The Epoch Times. “It was meant from the beginning to persecute pro-life Christians who love their neighbors.”
They also urged Trump to support a federal abortion ban: “Neither a heartbeat, brainwaves, viability, or other objective measurements of development determine the worth of a human being.”
The letter’s other signatories include Dr. Coleman Boyd, Cal Zastrow, Dennis Green, Eva Zastrow, Jim Zastrow, Heather Idoni, Chester Gallagher, Paul Place, and Paul Vaughn—each of whom were charged after a protest in Tennessee. Also signing were Justin Phillips and Joel Curry, who were indicted in Michigan.
Vaughn, who was under house arrest, is hoping that the pardon he received won’t render his pending appeal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit moot. The Justice Department filed a motion on Jan. 28 to vacate Vaughn’s and others’ convictions, as well as to remand the case for dismissal at the district court level.
The department also issued a memo on Jan. 24 instructing prosecutors to only enforce the FACE Act in “extraordinary circumstances involving death, extreme bodily harm, or significant property damage.”
But Vaughn and Herb Geraghty, who did not request a pardon for a conviction in Washington but nevertheless received one, are both seeking to continue their appeals as legal avenues for preventing future administrations from prosecuting other activists.
Thomas More Society senior counsel Steve Crampton, who represents Vaughn, told The Epoch Times that even with the pardon, his client still has a “stain on his record” that could complicate future employment.
“We don’t want to appear ungrateful,” Crampton said. “But the potential threat from future application of the FACE Act … and those conspiracy-against-rights charges by a future administration is real.”
Jonathan Darnel, who was convicted and sentenced in Washington, said the Justice Department’s enforcement memo is “good” but that FACE needs to either be repealed by Congress or struck down by the Supreme Court.
“In some sense, I wish I was still in prison … if that was the only option, I wish I was still there,” he said, noting the possibility of his case being used to challenge the FACE Act.
The Road Forward
Roughly two to three years after their initial indictments, the pardoned pro-lifers are faced with the task of returning to their lives outside of prison and continuing their activism.
“I’m still coping with this last incarceration,” Geraghty said.
In interviews with The Epoch Times, multiple activists expressed an interest in continued activism at abortion clinics and indicated they felt a moral obligation to stand between the unborn and those who would end their lives.
“I definitely still believe that abortion is murder and we should act like it,” Geraghty said.
Bell said that “when real human beings are dying, I think direct action is always mandatory to treat someone as a human being. So, it can never be out of my mind that if I were in a situation where I could save a child’s life, I’d have to be willing to step forward.”
Outside of potential activism, the grandmother of nine said “a lot of babysitting” is in her future.
Both she and Vaughn have pro-life ministries that they plan to pursue after their pardons. Bell lives in New Jersey, which still allows abortions, while Vaughn faces a different situation in his home state of Tennessee.
After the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, Tennessee enacted a law banning abortions in the state. According to the Guttmacher Institute, clinics in the state stopped offering abortions after the Supreme Court’s ruling.
“We’re considering how this shapes our ministry going forward, and what we’re going to do,” Vaughn said.
He added that “from a ministry standpoint … the battleground is shifting, shifting for life, and there are a lot more chemical abortions, and there still needs to be engagement with the culture on the beauty of life versus the destruction of abortion.”
Darnel, who created the website GetSeriousChurch.com, said he will likely shift his “focus a little bit from activism more to an online presence.”
Edl, meanwhile, intends to keep speaking out on behalf of the unborn, after a little rest. She added that she hopes others, emboldened by the momentum behind the pro-life cause, will join in those efforts.
“But if they don’t, I’ll be there as long as I have breath.”
Tom Ozimek contributed to this report.