It had been 16 months since decorated U.S. Army Captain Jonathan Darnel had been imprisoned for non-violent, pro-life activism. He still had 18 months left to serve of his 34-month sentence when on January 23, word came that the newly-inaugurated President Donald Trump had pardoned him and 22 of his fellow activists for their acts of civil disobedience.
For Darnel, that pardon was part celebration, part defeat.
Arrested nearly two years earlier for offering support to women outside the Washington Surgi-Clinic in Washington D.C., Darnel had been sentenced to nearly three years for charges of conspiracy against rights and for violation of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. But on the day of that rescue effort to save babies from abortion — October 22, 2020 — Darnel hadn’t been arrested with the other pro-lifers who went inside the building and barricaded themselves together using ropes and chains in classic protest style, causing the abortion business to close down for five hours so that no abortions could take place.
It was Darnel’s seventh rescue, but, as he explained to Live Action News, he had no intention of violating FACE that day. In fact, after the police locked the doors to the facility with his fellow pro-life activists inside, Darnel left to partake in another rescue at a different abortion business.
The “deep state” comes for pro-lifers
Eighteen months later, on March 30, 2022, Darnel was awakened by FBI agents banging on his door at 5:30 in the morning, breaking it off its hinges before rushing in to arrest him for the 2020 Washington Surgi-Clinic rescue.
The arrest came just days after other pro-life activists found the bodies of five babies aborted late into pregnancy in a medical waste bin outside of that facility. At the same time, the Supreme Court was reviewing Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that would soon overturn Roe v. Wade; what amounted to be a politically coordinated attack by the Biden Department of Justice (DOJ) to silence pro-lifers was only getting started.
“We didn’t hear anything for 18 months from authorities,” Darnel told Live Action News. “Probably because it was a Trump DOJ [at the time of the rescue]. However, you talk about the deep state — the FBI had gathered information on us. If you’re an abortion clinic in D.C., you have the FBI on speed dial. [An FBI agent] had been called up and he was walking around the clinic observing everything. We thought he was with the clinic; no, he was FBI. His colleagues interrogated my fellow rescuers, they were released, and nothing for 18 months.”
After months of “legal wrangling,” during which time he says he had trouble finding an attorney to represent him, Darnel and the other eight rescuers who were arrested were found guilty of violating the FACE Act and of acting violently because a nurse at Washington Surgi-Clinic had tripped and been injured.
Though Darnel had not entered the facility that day, he knew that time in prison was nothing compared to the dismemberments and lethal injections that the babies were being put through.
From left: Joan Andrews Bell, Jonathan Darnel, Jean Marshall
Darnel spent two consecutive Christmases in prison, away from his family and friends, and he was due to spend another 18 months there had Trump not pardoned him just days after taking office. Being reunited with loved ones was a reason to celebrate his release, but Darnel was also disappointed. He had hoped and planned along with his fellow activists that one of them would refuse the pardon and stay in prison.
Upon receiving guilty verdicts, they decided to appeal the decisions in the hope that their cases would reach the Supreme Court and lead to the repeal of the FACE Act. After they were pardoned, such a scenario would not be possible.
“DC is not subject to a circuit court,” he explained. “So the case would go from district court to the court of appeals to the Supreme Court. That’s a potential of two years cut off [the appeal timeline], and we thought if we got to the Supreme Court there was a good chance that the court could strike down FACE. It was a bad day [being found guilty] but we realized it could be positive. I was really looking forward to that and hoping that could happen.”
Ending abortion means getting involved
While Darnel was raised in a pro-life home, his parents were not activists. Like most pro-lifers, he said, they acted out their pro-life convictions through prayer and pro-life voting.
“That’s really as far as it went with me,” he said. “When I got into college … I looked at my lifestyle and [thought],’ I’m a pretty good guy. I don’t do any huge sins and so forth. I try to stay away from mental sins,’ but it occurred to me that it almost seemed too easy. Anyone with my upbringing and personality might have been the same way … might have the same outwardly peace. But a Christian should excel. There should be a distinction, a difference.”
He began to question how he could better serve God — and the issue of abortion came to his mind.
“Here we are in a country that murders kids on almost an industrial scale, and yet we have many freedoms that could be used to advocate for their defense — and there are a lot of people who are against abortion and could eradicate it,” he said. “Therefore, why are we doing so little? Why are we content with just praying or voting? … We are still just plodding along killing a million plus kids a year. My goodness, we need to drop what we are doing and deal with this holocaust… Yet all around me, I didn’t see anybody else doing that.”
After years of contemplation, Darnel began his pro-life efforts, driven to save children from abortion. He adamantly believes that every Christian should have that same drive. He thinks abortion would end “100 times faster” if every pro-life person took activism seriously.
But he doesn’t believe that changing the laws will be what leads to the end of abortion, especially if self-proclaimed pro-life politicians continue to take what he calls “the sneaky path.” Darnel explained to Live Action News:
In Virginia… when Gov. Youngkin was running for office … He was one of these guys who would say, ‘I’m pro-life but I have exceptions for rape, incest, so forth.’ Anytime an intelligent person says that, I see that as a red flag, because you can’t be intelligent and think about abortion to any great degree and not realize how hypocritical it is to say, ‘These are human beings. We shouldn’t kill them — unless dad was a rapist then you can kill them.’
The only reason an intelligent person would accept that argument is that they don’t really care about what they’re saying and what they’re thinking or they’re pandering or attempting to pander to the sensibilities of people. It’s just a dumb line of reasoning. So that sort of person, I don’t usually trust to be reliably pro-life. They are certainly not going to be a champion of the preborn.
And when he became governor, he wasn’t. He was promoting bills that were half-hearted. He was recorded by a hidden camera telling pro-life people, ‘Don’t talk about this a lot and after I’m elected then I’ll do some good things for you.’ He didn’t want to put forth abortion as a pivotal point in his campaign.
President Trump kind of did the same thing. He made a lot of promises to pro-life people but at the same time, he’s out there saying he’s not going to sign a national abortion ban, the six-week ban goes too far, his wife comes out as pro-choice.
While Darnel applauds pro-life laws, he believes that national repentance over abortion is of the utmost importance, including having national figures come out against abortion even if it hurts their political campaigns. He also values educational and grassroots efforts that inform Americans about abortion.
But all of the good pro-life work that has been done could be undone if the next president is more liberal on abortion.
“We haven’t had the success that we think we’ve had,” he explained. “No state has banned abortion; they’ve banned abortion clinics. They’ve made it illegal for someone to perform an abortion but a woman who obtains abortion drugs can kill her child without any repercussions. … Women will order their abortion pills from New York and abort their children in bathrooms in Alabama. It’s happening.”
He urges pro-lifers to get involved in hands-on pro-life work like rescue, saying that “if all those people were committed to rescue, we could shut down every abortion clinic pretty quickly, and even if they were to arrest all of those people and put 15% of the people in prison — which is not going to happen — the public wouldn’t be able to ignore that,” he said. “Civil disobedience, non-violent action, things like rescue — if done by more people would be massively influential in ending abortion.”
Could state-based attempts to shut down pro-life action be next?
Ultimately, Darnel would like to see the FACE Act destroyed. He created the website “Smash the Face” to advocate for its repeal.
He is also preparing for the possibility that certain states will try to implement their own laws similar to FACE as a response to Trump’s DOJ decision that “no new abortion-related FACE Act actions — criminal or civil — will be permitted without authorization from the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division,” according to Chad Mizele, the chief of staff to the attorney general.
Mizele told prosecutors in January to enforce the FACE Act only in “extraordinary circumstances” — such as when death, extreme bodily harm, or significant property damage occur during an act against a ‘reproductive health care’ facility, which includes abortion facilities and pregnancy resource centers. He noted that future violations of the FACE Act will be handled by state or local law enforcement with exceptions for federal investigations in cases that include “significant aggravating factors.”
Of course, this means that state and local law enforcement could become extremely heavy-handed against pro-life outreach; several states and some localities are already trying to shut down pregnancy centers which offer alternatives to abortion and free resources.
For now, Darnel is spending much-needed time with his family, helping to care for them as they deal with rising medical concerns. But he has no intention of walking away from his life-saving mission, even if he has to do it alone.
“In every church I ever attended, all the Christians around me seemed to be like my parents — pro-life and they voted Republican and that was it. And I couldn’t figure out why that’s how they were behaving. That was hard to get over. I struggled with it for a long time,” he said.
“We are taught that before you make a decision about what to do with your life, you have to feel God moving you to do it. … I never felt a darn thing. I didn’t want to drop everything to fight abortion,” Darnel said. “I didn’t want to leave college. I certainly wasn’t going to be a roaming activist. It was hard to accept, so I delayed for nine years before taking the plunge. I thought I must be wrong [about fighting abortion] even though it made perfect sense to me — because if I was correct, how come nobody else agreed with me?”
He added, “It was after I entered the army —I did two tours — and dug into the work of missionaries that I finally was able to say, ‘One individual can be right when everyone else is wrong. It is possible.’ If you had asked the average or the above-average Christian in 1820 how vigorously the church should have been combatting slavery, they would have said, ‘Slavery is wrong.’ It never occurred to many of them to do anything about it.”
