SAN FRANCISCO (LifeSiteNews) — A peaceful pro-life advocate was arrested on Thursday for filming her activities outside of a California Planned Parenthood location, allegedly violating the state’s Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act.
Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust reports that one of its organizers, Anastasia Rogers, was arrested on December 18 outside of the abortion giant’s Bush Street San Francisco facility, on a warrant that a 14-second Instagram reel she had posted two months earlier allegedly violated the California FACE Act’s prohibition on anyone “caus[ing] [a] person to be intimidated” when he or she “videotapes, films, photographs, or records by electronic means” a client, employee, or assistant without consent.
Rather than evidencing intimidation, the footage in question shows an abortion escort silently ignoring Rogers. Survivors maintains that she “did not tell Rogers not to film her.”
Pro-Life San Francisco adds that Rogers “was handcuffed and taken to the county jail based on a false claim by on-duty security alleging ‘threatening language’ in an Instagram post about her sidewalk outreach.” Their video of the arrest appears to show a responding officer confirming that she is familiar with the requirements of the buffer zone, that a witness corroborated she was not obstructing the entrance, and that she was within her legal rights to distribute literature. She was later arrested when the officers’ check turned up a warrant for her.
However, “Survivors’ lawyer was unable to get any details related to Rogers’ warrant,” the group says. “After exhausting every option, Rogers and her lawyer reasoned that the lack of response to their repeated inquiries indicated that the ‘warrant’ was either non-existent or designed to keep her from conducting outreach at Planned Parenthood” on a day when surgical abortions were scheduled, meaning it was the last chance to get a critical batch of clients to change their minds.
Rogers spent seven hours in jail before her release, with a court date slated for February.
“If Planned Parenthood thinks that throwing me in jail for 7 hours or 7 days is going to stop me from loving my neighbor – the preborn child, they’re wrong,” Rogers said.
The federal FACE Act, which was theoretically intended to protect access to medical facilities without political bias, and its state-level counterparts have long been the abortion lobby’s most potent tools with which to silence and punish peaceful pro-life advocates.
Among the most egregious cases were 23 pro-lifers prosecuted by the Biden Justice Department for entering abortion centers and refusing to leave and who received prison time despite several of them being elderly with medical issues. Also concerning was the case of Mark Houck, a Philadelphia pro-lifer whom the DOJ prosecuted under the FACE Act after he was arrested in a morning FBI raid for a physical altercation with a hostile abortion supporter that local authorities had already dismissed. Houck was acquitted in January 2023; President Donald Trump pardoned the 23 others in his first week back in office.
On the national level, the Trump administration has instructed the Department of Justice to abide by strict new limits on when the federal FACE Act should be invoked, to prevent it from being abused as it was under the Biden administration. Many pro-lifers insist that the FACE Act must still be repealed entirely, saying that localities can handle genuine local crimes on their own and that the danger of a future pro-abortion president abusing the law again is too great. In March, U.S. Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) reintroduced legislation to repeal the FACE Act in the House of Representatives.
