WASHINGTON —A year after receiving his pardon, one pro-life activist wants President Donald Trump to do better on key priorities of the movement, like ending mail-order abortions.
Trump pardoned John Hinshaw, along with 22 other activists, just days after taking office in January 2025. Hinshaw spent 17 months in prison after protesting the Washington, D.C. abortion clinic where the bodies of five late-term babies were reportedly discovered, raising concerns of illegal partial-birth abortions.
“President Trump, despite pardoning me, needs to do a better job,” Hinshaw told the Daily Caller News Foundation, still noting Trump is doing “some good things.”
Ahead of the March for Life, the Trump administration announced several new pro-life policies, including an expansion of the Mexico City policy that restricts foreign aid funds from promoting abortion, an investigation into whether Planned Parenthood illegally received over $88 million in COVID-19 loans from the Small Business Administration and an end to funding for fetal tissue research.
“But you know, the last couple of weeks we’ve heard about backing off the Hyde Amendment,” Hinshaw said. “We heard that some funding was restored to Planned Parenthood with no explanation. And then of course, there is the ongoing scandal of abortion poison going out through the mail to women that the doctor has never met.”
WATCH:
The Trump administration quietly restored millions of dollars in frozen Title X family planning grants to Planned Parenthood in December, leading the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to drop its lawsuit. Tom McClusky, CatholicVote director of government affairs, told the Daily Signal the agency may have restored the funds because they were going to lose the lawsuit.
Several Planned Parenthood affiliates refused $2.3 million in unfrozen grants, which had been withheld over Diversity, Equity and Inclusion-related investigations, the Daily Caller reported Thursday.
Hinshaw has been to almost every March for Life since the first, missing some when he was in jail. Seeing the event grow each year from around 20,000 people at the first march in 1974 has been “unbelievable.”
“The energy is through the roof,” Hinshaw said. “It’s incredible how many [young people] we’ve got. It’s a tremendous sign of hope to an old guy like me.”
‘Undermined Every Single Day’
Hinshaw told the DCNF that the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which he was convicted of violating, needs to be repealed.
Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) is now pursuing FACE Act charges against anti-ICE protestors who disrupted a church service in Minnesota, since the law protects houses of worship along with abortion clinics and pregnancy centers.
“My joke is that President Trump, realizing that the Republicans will never get the spine up to get rid of FACE, decided, well, let’s use it against the Democrats and maybe they’ll vote FACE out, which, by the way, they might,” Hinshaw said. “I was alive in ’94 when they passed FACE. The Republicans didn’t know what to do to stop it. They managed to put that tag in there to protect houses of worship. And so I mean it’s there. They should certainly use it.”
At his sentencing in May 2024, Hinshaw said he is “sorry to this generation that it has lost a third of its own to abortion.”
“How is it that my granddaughter is a treasure, and the others are trash?” he said. “There is a reason why today’s gospel reading is to lay down one’s life for his friends. This is not a coincidence.”
Hinshaw was arrested in December after helping to block a Planned Parenthood facility in Memphis, Tennessee, with Rescue Resurrection, according to Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (PAAU).
Nearly 20 members of the Rescue Resurrection group were taken into custody on Thursday during a protest over the abortion pill outside the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), according to Lifesite News.
During remarks from the March for Life rally stage, Vice President JD Vance told pro-lifers concerned that not enough political progress is being made to remember how far the movement has already come in the last decade.
“I want you to know that I hear you, and that I understand there will inevitably be debates within this movement,” Vance said. “We love each other, and we’re going to have open conversations about how best to use our political system to advance life, how prudential we must be in the cause of advancing human life. I think these are good, honest and natural debates. And frankly, they’re not just good for all of you. They help keep people like me honest, and that’s an important thing.”
SBA Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser said Friday that the administration’s “position of ‘back to the states’ is being undermined every single day as abortion drugs flood illegally into pro-life states.”
“It is time for the Trump-Vance administration to act and at a minimum restore in-person dispensing, getting these dangerous drugs out of the mail,” Dannenfelser said. “Doing so would allow states to enforce their laws, protect countless unborn lives, and restore essential medical oversight to stop the coercion and abuse of women nationwide.”
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