Lauren Handy: ‘Is the sacrifice worth it?’

After a presidential pardon, pro-life activist Lauren Handy reflects on prison, and the future

Catholic pro-life advocate Lauren Handy was pardoned last month for federal crimes stemming from a 2020 protest in which she and others entered a Washington, D.C., abortion clinic, with some locking themselves inside, and urging women inside not to undergo abortions.

Lauren Handy. Credit: PAUU

Handy, 31, was incarcerated at the federal FCI Tallahassee, until she was released Jan. 23. Before her release, she was serving a 57-month sentence — she first spent nine months in a county jail after a 2023 conviction, and was transferred to federal prison, where she spent seven months before she and other pro-life activists were pardoned.

Handy is the director of activism and mutual aid at the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, and rose to national prominence in 2022, after it was discovered that she and fellow activists had found a box containing the bodies of unborn babies — victims of abortion —outside of a Washington-area abortion clinic.

After her release from prison, Handy spoke last week with The Pillar, about her incarceration, her faith, healing, and her future.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Lauren, you were released from federal prison just days ago. Let’s start with that: What does it feel like to be out?

It feels very disorienting and weird to be honest, but it also feels really good because I'm back home with my family.

But there are complex emotions, [and] I’m missing my folks back in prison, my good friends back in prison.

I had goals there. I had set goals for myself and I had projects I was working on. So it feels weird to have my projects abruptly end, and now to be trying to figure out where I am going with my life.

How do I go forward?

What are my projects now?

I feel like since our first interview back in 2022, I'm completely different: My values and my principles are more firm. They’re more clear to me.

But right now I'm taking everything very slowly, because I don't want to jump into something and then have to backtrack.

I suspect there is some readjustment: From very structured days in prison to having charge of your own time.

No. [FCI] Tallahassee is one of the worst female prisons in the country, and we have no structure — zero structure.

I mean, the only structure is yes, we had count at 4:00 P.M. and 9:00 P.M. and lunch is at 10:30 A.M. and dinner is at 4:35, or 5:00, or 5:30.

But I was in a very chaotic prison, and so I had to plan out my own days.

You said that your convictions and values are more firm. Does that apply to your perspective on anti-abortion work? You were incarcerated for a “rescue” at an abortion clinic, with you leading a group people locking themselves inside an abortion clinic.

After time in prison, do you still believe that’s the right approach?

Yes. As to rescue, that has never changed and I don't think it will ever change.

Nonviolent direct action is such a vital part in any movement work across any social justice issue, and it is a component that pro-lifers shy away from for various reasons.

But I believe it is key — politically and spiritually — to move our movement forward.

Everyone looks with hindsight at their choices, and sees what they might have done differently. I have now had 17 months of contemplation about how we could have done things differently.

And I definitely think we can firm up how we approach direction action — grounding our people better, and training them better, with more preparation and more deescalation training, with a better sense of why we do certain things, and then preparing people for consequences, so that people aren’t just trying to figure it out as they serve nine months in a county jail.

For me, the first nine months in jail [while awaiting sentencing] were probably some of the hardest for me. I was reconstructing who I was, figuring myself out, where I felt totally lost, and I felt totally shattered.

Those first nine months, I was definitely picking up the pieces of myself.

But the best way is just keep looking for the way to go forward — staying in solution mode.

Lauren, you’re convinced that rescue is key to the pro-life movement. But what would you say to parents of small children, or parish pastors, or other people who feel their responsibilities preclude that direct action?

I’m thinking about Heather, one of my direct co-defendants, who has 15 children. I think of Bevelyn, who has a three-year-old at home, and she spent all that time in [FCI] Aliceville, which is a very hard place.

She was in a very dangerous place in prison, and she has a three-year-old.

And then I think about all the people I was incarcerated with, who had family members and children back home, who had their babies taken away from them in county jail, and then got sentenced to federal prison.

I feel for people with children, and from different walks of life. But there are people who believe the sacrifice is worth it.

You just have to think: Is the sacrifice worth it? What am I willing to lose? What am I willing to give up?

If you ask me, right now, would I be willing to go back for another 17 months? —I don't know if I'd be willing to go right now, because of where I am right now, but I'm definitely willing to do an opportunity rescue.

An opportunity rescue is going into the facility, passing out roses, passing out literature, passing out little Christmas gifts if it’s Christmastime, and then leaving before the cops come.

There are different ways to do direct action, and they don’t all necessarily involve bike locks. It can be as simple as this: If you’re doing regular sidewalk counseling, and there’s someone in the parking lot you’re talking to, you might decide to stop yelling 20 feet across the parking lot, and to go have a conversation face-to-face. So you just take those steps into the parking lot, and when you’re done, you go back to the sidewalk.

That might lead to a trespassing charge, but you have to weigh the consequences.

I am not going to judge anybody who has sincerely weighed the consequences and realizes that at the current point in their life, they can’t do [some direct action.]

But the fact is that there are people, including my co-defendants, who have faced serious consequences, and who had large families, or children at home.

I am very privileged with where I am in life right now, that I don’t have small dependents that I have to take care of.

But it was probably extremely difficult for Bevelyn, and she would probably say something very similar: That it was definitely worth it.

It was definitely hard. But we can still do things even though they're hard.

Once again, I'm not telling everyone: Okay, now go get bike locks. I'm definitely not saying that. I am saying that you have to follow your conscience.

Still, to be honest, I think most people should just try sidewalk counseling before they even talk about rescue. Sidewalk counseling is the basic thing.

Are you sidewalk counseling outside of [just] 40 Days for Life? Are you going out there on a Saturday?

Sometimes people think we have to start big, big, big, big, big. But before I ever did rescue, I'd been sidewalk counseling for a solid 10 years.

We talked a few years back about the prospect of incarceration, and you told me that if you were put into prison, you’d see that as an opportunity to advocate for women there, and to be in solidarity with them. Was that your experience?

Yes, much more so than I thought.

As word spread around the Tallahassee campus about my charges, it was almost a daily occurrence that people were coming up to me and telling me about their pregnancy losses through miscarriage or abortion, or telling me their family separation stories.

I was basically inundated with people wanting to be heard.

[In prison] there's so much hurt, and so much yearning for help and for belonging, and just for somebody to listen. I think that's why my time of incarceration wasn't so devastating, because I had such purposeful and meaningful interactions with folks.

At the start of my incarceration in the federal prison — the seven months I spent in Tallahassee — the Catholic community group there was just three people, and I was the third person. It was a dying group. I told myself that by time I left, we would have a thriving Catholic group. When I did leave, we had around 15 or 20 people actively coming.

It was active recruitment on the campus, pushing the staff to post information on the bulletin [board], trying to get more engaging content.

I am still going to be working with the people I left behind, sending them dynamic literature, sending them crochet patterns to do so they can make rosaries, because we don't have any rosaries to give out.

It’s funny to hear you say ‘active recruitment on campus.’ I expect to hear that phrase from a FOCUS missionary — and you’re talking about federal prison!

[Laughs]

It really is the way [FCI] Tallahassee is set up. It looks like a little small indie college.

But I was very hesitant when I first started talking with people, because I didn’t know how they were going to respond.

Violence erupts very easily in prison, especially living in an open dorm. I was serving time with people who committed extreme and obscene acts of violence, and people who were still committing extreme acts of violence.

I had to learn how to engage with sensitive empathy, being more open-minded, being more tolerant, and learning to accept people as they are at that moment.

It was extremely challenging, even just meeting people from all over the country, in all different walks of life, with all different stories.

There were very hard moments — especially seeing acts of violence play out in front of me, and not being able to do anything to stop it. I think that was the most challenging part.

But to listen, to abide with people — those are some skills which I learned, which I did not have beforehand.

Shortly before your release, you wrote an essay in which you said that “healing is the victory.” What did you mean by that?

Before my incarceration, I was a very goal-minded person: “We're going to do things. We're going to repeal FACE. We're going to get back at the abortion industry. We're going to push back at [abortionist] Cesare Santangelo.”

But I didn't have... I was a mess. I wasn't feeling or addressing any of the grief or the anger or the resentment that I had felt from finding the babies, or the aftermath of finding the babies — the ostracization and abandonment that I felt from parts of the [pro-life] movement, the mistreatment I had faced along the way.

I never addressed it.

I was pushing it down. I was just like” We have to win. We have to win, we have to win.”

And then that was all taken away from me. And I had no direction.

So I'm sitting in county jail, and I just started listening to podcasts about trauma and about healing, and I realized that how we get to the end is important — the journey to our goal is just as important as the goal.

And I felt like my journey of healing, and becoming more embodied, and becoming more present with myself, and becoming more calm — addressing all that anger and self-hatred inside felt satisfying and more long-lasting.

During my incarceration, I was watching us lose the battle in the states on abortion, and then even on the first day of his administration, Trump signed away all those EPA laws. And I am not making any environmental ideology statements right now, but I just was reflecting on how environmental activists probably spent a long time trying to get those in place. And with a stroke of a pen, they disappeared.

And with a stroke of a pen, all of our pro-life efforts can disappear. We saw that under Biden — and then with a stroke of a pen, all of our pro-life efforts reappeared under Trump.

That instability — that fleetingness — is not very compelling for me anymore.

So I was looking for something that I can sink my roots into. I feel like finding healing, becoming more embodied, becoming more present with myself, clarifying my values, clarifying my principles, is something that can withstand the shifts in power, shifts in political maneuvering.

I was watching people I was working with while in prison in Tallahassee, and seeing their healing journeys and I just realized that healing change can withstand these rapid shifts. That's what I want to work towards. That's what I want to cultivate and help grow.

Lauren, where was the Lord in all of that? Where was the Lord in your incarceration?

I'll be honest with you: After finding the babies, I hit an extremely dark period in my life.

I was practically never going to Mass, I had stopped praying. I was really struggling with so much darkness in my life.

And then I was abruptly taken away from my community and my family.

We were not expecting me to be incarcerated immediately after the guilty verdict. And I truly felt in that moment that every single thing was taken from me.

One of the things I had to piece back together was my relationship with Jesus and my relationship to the Church.

I started getting into the Word again and started listening to some podcasts, and just learning to trust in his mercy, and to trust in his love...

I wrote a reflection, which I've never published, on holy doubt — on embracing that it's okay not to have all the answers.

The basis of it was in the Gospel of Matthew, right before the Great Commission, it talks about the apostles. It says “they worshiped him, but some doubted.”

And then it immediately goes into the Great Commission.

And I thought to myself: “Here are the apostles. They're worshiping, they're scared, they're uncertain, they're doubting. And yet Jesus gives them the authority, and gives them reassurance, and instead of chastising them, he's giving them authority.”

And it really gave me a sense of comfort, that it's okay that I don't have all the answers right now, and I can relax in that.

By relaxing in that, I was able to reconnect with my spirituality, and then it really flourished and blossomed in federal prison, because then I had an actual community I could connect with.

—
In the Catholic group, there was one point in which we were trying to figure out what kind of things we wanted to do: There were traditionalist Catholics who wanted to have adoration, read from the Catechism, watch only Catholic-made media.

And then there were some other folks who were like, “Well, we also want to watch The Chosen.” [Laughs] They wanted to do some more things that I guess you could label as more modern.

It was getting a little rocky and feelings were getting hurt. And I said: “Everyone, let's stop. Let's do 15 minutes of adoration and specifically focus our attention on this, and let's refocus and recenter.”

Then after that we came back, and we decided on more of an ‘abundant leadership’ style, where each person would take a week, and we would learn stuff from that person.

And then we all shared about how we are and how we came to Catholicism and our journey, and it was really beautiful and really soft and gentle .I really enjoyed that, going out of my comfort zone, and really celebrating the universality of the Church.

Really, from that moment, the group started to grow.

Did you say you went to adoration? In a federal prison?

Federal prison is very interesting, in that they take religious observances very seriously.

We had Jewish folks on campus, Muslim, messianic Jewish, and then a lot of other minority religions also, and Buddhists and native practices as well.

There were Catholic and evangelical Protestant services. We had a little sacristy, a tabernacle with the Blessed Sacrament, and we had a Eucharistic minister volunteer come, and we had a priest come, and we were allowed to have adoration.

And I was able to get off of work on certain feast days.

So they took religious practice very seriously. In federal prison, there are some people who are there for decades or for life, and so it's not like county jail, where technically you're really only supposed to be for a couple of months, and they don't provide [religious] resources that seriously.

I’m struck that you’re describing a prayer life, healing, ministry, and solidarity and friendship — and all of this is juxtaposed against a setting of real violence, and real suffering. It seems like in federal prison, you found beauty, and beautiful things came to you.

I had a lot of fun days. I had a lot of fun days. I feel like some people think I was put on the rack and being tortured every day.

But, no, I actually had a lot of fun days, and I made a lot of really great friends.

Some days, we’d go walk the track in the morning where there's trees and nature, and then we’d go play card games in the rec, and then we go down to the library, and then we put all of our food together and we make some really great, yummy food.

I learned how to make tamales. I learned how to make chilaquiles. I learned how to make all this really great food.

And some days were just really awesome, but it was so paradoxical. I was desperately missing my family, I was desperately missing my community, I was desperately missing all of these people back home, but I was also cherishing that time, however long it was going to be, and trying to live in the present at the same time.

You were pardoned on January 23. How long before it happened were you expecting it?

I didn't think it was going to happen. I absolutely categorically did not think at all I was going to get pardoned.

I was telling everyone in my life back home: “I'm not getting pardoned. Please do not talk about it. Please do not get your hopes up. I don't want you to feel disappointment.”

I was about to start in February, a nine-month trauma treatment program. I was signing up for college courses. I was crafting a catechism course, to do an informal RCIA. I had no intention or thought that I was going to get pardoned.

But then it did happen. What was the moment like?

Bizarre. It was so bizarre. I was on the phone with [a friend], and she's like: “I'm seeing a video of him signing the executive order.”

And I told her: “No, that's AI generated. Don't believe it.”

And then the phones cut off because it was 4:00 p.m. count, and people were yelling at me to run to my door, because the scary guard was going to yell at me.

I had no way for anyone to confirm that it was for real until the phones turned back on at 4:30.

But we have these little teeny radios, these little plastic radios, and everyone was putting on their radios and going to NPR, or going to different talk radios, trying to see if anybody was saying anything.

One of my friends heard that Hannity talk radio was talking about the pardons. But you have to be really quiet during count, they treat it far more seriously than it actually is.

So I'm crying, and my friends are trying to hug me, but we're also trying not to get yelled at by the guards.

And after count happens, after count happens, I'm running back to the phone to confirm that it's true.

We didn’t know what to do because I had just gone commissary, and I had so much food in my locker, and that was supposed to last me for two weeks.

So I told people: “I'm going to be leaving, let's have a party.”

We had a huge party; my last night was spent celebrating with my friends. We made a bunch of potato balls!

I celebrated with my friends and I wrote people's contact information down.

It just didn’t feel real. And I didn’t know the details. I thought: “I guess I’ll leave tomorrow morning.” But nope. I went to bed at 11, and they woke me up at 11:30, and said, “you’ve got to go before the 12:00 a.m. count.”

I thought I’d be sitting out on the sidewalk all night. My parents had told me they wanted to come, so they were driving down to pick me up, but they wouldn’t be in Tallahassee until 7:00 a.m.

So I thought I’d go sit on the sidewalk until 7:00 a.m. And I thought: “That’s ok. That’s fine. I can do that. I’ve done harder things.”

But instead, the prison bought me a hotel room — a taxi, and a room. It was a semi-nice hotel, too, a nice new Holiday Inn.

My parents picked me up at the hotel, and then I had to make choices very quickly. Very quickly.

I became inundated with press requests and people wanting me to come to the March for Life.

Old Lauren would have been like: “Yes, yes, yes. Go straight into burning the candle and go straight into burnout mode.” But I said, “No, I'm going to go visit my grandma's grave.”

Did she die while you were incarcerated?

Yeah. Three weeks before I was pardoned, she died.

So I said, “No. I'm going to go visit my grandpa, and put flowers on my grandmother's grave, and I need to do that. …I need to slow down, and I need to remember everything that I learned and everything that firmed up with my life. And I can't just get swept up into the fun, and into the emotions, I have to remember the intentionality — this road to intentionality and embodiment that I started.”

And I'm really glad I did that. It was really healing, going to my grandmother's grave, and being able to place flowers. It was great to see my grandpa, my auntie, and good to spend time with my family.

One of the biggest things I learned was that I had definitely an addiction to urgency.

The biggest thing in prison is you learn to hurry up and wait. You get a guilty verdict and then you have to wait nine months to be sentenced. You get transferred, and then you have to wait 10 hours before you're processed.

I learned to wait. And [that] not everything is urgent. Not everything has to be done immediately.

It's okay to wait to take your time.

I'm still trying to remember that feeling, and the intentionality, and not jumping back into that addiction to urgency.

So do you have a sense now of what that will mean for your pro-life work? Do you have a sense of how to move forward while holding that urgency at bay?

I really don't. It's definitely a day-at-a-time type of a thing.

It's definitely going to be practicing and relearning, and really firming up my values, and knowing that I'm going to be making mistakes along the way, and that mistakes aren't so catastrophic and devastating — That they can be generative and healing instead.

It’s going to be allowing myself to give myself the space to make mistakes, try to figure things out along the way.

I have general ideas and thoughts about what I want, and what I want to see and what I want to do, but the actual steps and path I'm still trying to figure out.

You work with the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising. You make clear that your politics are progressive. Donald Trump pardoned you. Is that confusing?

No, not necessarily confusing, not for me. I am very pragmatic.

While I was incarcerated, I wrote PAUU’s “Unity Through Diversity” statement. It’s an organizing strategy about working with people who are not fully aligned with you in different areas, but when you have some alignment in some areas.

I don't mind working with people who are different from me, because I think we should try to broaden our movement. Instead of being a clubhouse, it needs to be a wide, wide-reaching movement. So we need people from all types of backgrounds and ideologies working together. I think we can do that in ways that are principled and respectful.

That means you're going to have to learn how to navigate discomfort with working with people you disagree with. And even working with people who are left-of-center: My views are very far left, and so even working with people who are left-of-center, I do not agree on most things with the average Democrat or the average liberal.

It's very easy and natural for me to have to work with people who are different from me because my views are so passionate — I tend to be very passionate and on point with everything I do — and I have to recognize, no, not everyone is like that.

And so as for the whole Trump thing: Yes, he's the one who personally signed it, but all of these pro-life organizations were lobbying, all of these congresspeople were advocating, all of these grassroots activists were pushing the corporate pro-life organizations to be lobbyists. And so, it's a whole wide ecosystem, and President Trump is the tip of the iceberg.

My lawyers from the Thomas More Society have been there for the entire time. And the young folks from PAUU have been continuing to rescue this entire time, even during the Biden administration — that is beyond brave of them.

So yes, Trump pardoned me, but there's a whole ecosystem that created that one moment.

FCI Tallahassee was in the news in November because it was reported that there wasn't enough food for inmates — there were extreme budget cuts.

What can you say about America's prison system and what you experienced, especially with regard to the dignity of incarcerated people?

There is so much rampant fraud going on in the prison system, and the incarcerated people are suffering immensely.

There's no programming.

The food is obscene. [FCI Tallahassee] failed our health inspection.

I worked in the kitchen. I worked pots and pans, and so I saw firsthand the horrible conditions we were having to live under.

There were no appropriate blankets. We have people who are elderly, living in a room where you can see your breath.

Our campus had asbestos and our campus had black mold. Our campus has rats in the kitchen.

[FCI Tallahassee] is truly one of the worst female prisons in the country.

And it's hard — It was hard having to live under those conditions.

And because of the lack of programming, because there was no structure, there was so much rampant drug addiction and drug use.

And because they're in a traumatized setting, and [inmates] have no appropriate or healthy outlets, they're going to keep going to drugs. They came in for drugs, they're going to continue using drugs. And it's truly devastating seeing the rampant drug use and addiction.

What's going on is not exaggerated — it’s actually being under-reported. And it's very sad that it's hard to advocate for incarcerated people, because there is an assumption that people deserve this type of treatment.

And I firmly don't believe that. I don't think people should be given rotten food, given inappropriate servings of food, leaving people going hungry, or seeing people going to sleep cold.

There are definitely things that I'm personally working on, because that was probably one of the biggest things asked of me as I was leaving: “Don't forget us.”

There were people begging me not to forget them, not to forget what's going on, and to use this extremely privileged opportunity, rare opportunity [of a pardon], to do good for the people I've left behind.

And of course I will try.

I plan on going lobbying this week, sharing letters which people wrote that wanted me to give to specific Congress people.

I am going to use this opportunity, because I was not thinking I was going to be given this opportunity, and I want to help lessen the suffering of the people I had to leave behind.

I feel horrible that I had to leave them behind, but I'm going to use this opportunity to help lessen suffering hopefully.

I have to be realistic about everything I do. I don’t have the idea that I’m going to close down [FCI] Tallahassee. But I am going to keep saying yes and see where it takes me.