Interview With Pro-Life Activist Whose Mother Was Visited by FBI

An FBI logo is pictured on an agent's shirt in the Manhattan borough of New York, on Oct. 19, 2021. Carlo Allegri/Reuters

The Epoch Times’ “Crossroads” channel recently spoke to a pro-life activist whose mother was visited by two FBI agents.

According to a doorbell video that went viral online, on April 18, two FBI agents showed up at the Virginia home of Tracy Ketch, the mother of Elise Ketch. The agents told Tracy: “We just need to speak with [Elise] regarding some information that was sent in to us.”

Elise Ketch, 26, told “Crossroads” in a recent interview that when her mother called her and informed her about the agents, she told her mother not to tell them anything and told the FBI agents to contact her attorney because she would not speak to them without one. The FBI hasn’t tried to contact her since.

Pro-Life Activism

Ketch is a member of Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (PAAU), a left-leaning pro-life activist group. She officially joined PAAU in December 2022 after a few months of volunteering with the group.

The group made headlines in early April last year for exposing an abortion clinic in Washington, D.C., owned by abortionist Dr. Cesare Santangelo. The clinic is accused of having carried out partial-birth abortion or infanticide on at least five unborn babies. Partially delivering, then killing, a growing baby has been illegal nationwide since 2003.

Ketch told NTD, the sister media of The Epoch Times: “While they reassured my mother that I was not in trouble, it’s also possible that they see me as a threat due to my pro-life activism and intended to investigate me.”

“While the visit did make me concerned for the safety of my family, I refuse to back down.”

Ketch told Crossroads she suspects the FBI also wanted to intimidate her “because I associate with people like Lauren Handy, who are trying to bring back the rescue movement in the pro-life movement.”

“[The FBI agents] said that they were there just there to speak with me about some information they had received. And right now, my colleague Lauren Handy is being prosecuted in federal court for breaking the FACE Act,” Ketch added.

Left-wing pro-life protester Lauren Handy, the director of activism with Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, protests outside the U.S. Supreme Court on June 15, 2022 Jackson Elliott/The Epoch Times

Surgi-Clinic Protest

Handy and eight others from the group are currently facing charges from the Biden administration’s Department of Justice for allegedly violating the 1994 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act in relation to an incident that the activists call a “direct action rescue” at the Washington Surgi-Clinic abortion center on Oct. 22, 2020.

PAAU carries out rescue initiatives where its activists enter an abortion clinic and persuade women to not follow through with their planned abortions.

Photos taken of the Surgi-Clinic protest posted on Facebook show pro-life activists tied or chained to chairs inside the clinic. The chairs appear to block one door inside the clinic.

The FACE Act makes it a crime to use or attempt the use of force, physical obstruction, or intimidation to block access to “reproductive health care services.”

“My immediate thought was, oh, they found something on [Lauren],” Ketch said of the FBI agents who visited her mom. “And now they’re trying to verify it through me.”

The Epoch Times has contacted the FBI for comment.

‘Long History’ of Being Targeted

Ketch said there has been a “long history” of federal agents “going after pro-life activists.”

“We’ve got one guy in jail for years now—not in prison, per se. But he got put in for having bipolar disorder and for refusing to tell people that abortion isn’t murder,” Ketch shared. “And every time that he gets reevaluated to get out of the psych ward, and he says ‘abortion is murder,’ they keep him [back] in. It’s crazy. It’s crazy what they can do to you.”

Ketch said the unnamed man “used to participate in rescues like my colleague allegedly does.”

The Epoch Times recently reported on the experiences of pro-life activists—including the experiences of PAAU members Handy and Jonathan Darnel—who have had their homes raided by federal agents.

‘The Five’

Recalling the discovery last year at the Washington clinic owned by Santangelo, Ketch told “Crossroads” that PAAU had obtained the remains of 115 aborted babies, five of whom were nearly full term—dubbed “The Five.”

“It looks like three of them may have been aborted through illegal means, so we’ve got [allegedly] partial-birth abortion,” Ketch said.

The remains of a child they found, whom they named Harriet, was suspected of having had this kind of abortion “because the back of her skull was collapsed, like, her body had been pulled out [of the mother], and then they shoved a vacuum into her brain and killed her,” Ketch said.

Another child, who was named “Christopher X,” had no wounds, but Ketch says the PAAU activists believe he “probably was born alive and then left to die.”

Meanwhile, Phoenix was born and left in the amniotic sac. “And it’s not pierced,” said Ketch. “So again, it seems like [the baby] was born alive and then left to drown in his only amniotic fluid. It’s evil ... It’s just infanticide at this point.”

Ketch accused federal agents of having “tried to cover up the entire scenario by arresting Lauren Handy the same day that she reported to the police that she had these bodies that she recovered them.”

Handy and seven others were arrested on the same day the 115 babies’ remains were retrieved—March 30, 2022, in relation to the October 2020 incident at the Washington Surgi-Clinic abortion center.

A day following Handy’s arrest, on March 31, 2020, the Metropolitan Police Department came to her home to collect the five babies’ remains.

A priest working with PAAU later buried the other 110 babies’ remains in an undisclosed location.

As of March 2023, police still haven’t questioned Handy or other PAAU members about them. “It’s just business as usual for DC police: cover up and ignore,” Terrisa Bukovinac, PAAU’s executive director, told The Epoch Times in late March.