Statement of Fr. Fidelis Moscinski, CFR

Fr. Fidelis praying outside Planned Parenthood in Downtown Manhattan,
​September 5, 2020. 

​Statement of Fr. Fidelis Moscinski, CFR
United States District Court, Eastern District of New York
June 27, 2023
 
    Your Honor, I offer the following comments in order to assist you in imposing the most appropriate sentence in my case.
 
    My actions on July 7, 2022 were done because Planned Parenthood as an organization is in the business of killing. Every procured abortion that occurs on its premises constitutes the deliberate killing of an innocent human being. Furthermore, these bloody and violent acts also cause grave spiritual and psychological harm to the mother of the child. All my actions then and now are directed solely towards preventing the murder of defenseless children and the wounding of their mothers.
 
    On that day I was also aware of the evidence compiled by the House Select Panel on Infant Lives that Planned Parenthood, contrary to federal law, profits from the harvesting and selling of the body parts of unborn children. This grisly trade in human tissues and organs is deemed by many as revolting and sickening since it reduces human beings to mere objects that can be bought and sold. But perhaps this practice of Planned Parenthood should not surprise us since its founder, Margaret Sanger, was a known racist and eugenicist who once opined that ”We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.”
 
    Now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned and we have been delivered from the delusion that abortion was ever a constitutional right we are still sadly burdened with the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. This pseudo-law seeks to cloak the act of killing preborn children under the euphemistic and Orwellian language of “reproductive health care.” I am not guilty of violating this law because this law cannot be seen as anything other than null and void since it attempts to give legal protection to actions which are intrinsically evil and unjust.
 
    I recognize that this view may not be shared by your Honor. I would like you to know that I find the pernicious error of legal positivism both logically incoherent and immensely destructive in practice. The tragic and shameful history of legalized slavery in the South and the more recent genocides of the twentieth century should be more than sufficient to show us the folly of simply accepting something as “legal” because it is the product of some legislative or judicial process. Would it not be much better to acknowledge the truth that there must be a necessary and intrinsic connection between our civil laws and the natural moral law written on the human heart, knowable by human reason, and revealed authoritatively by God Himself in the Ten Commandments?
 
    If you are, as I suspect, unwilling to correct your earlier mistaken judgment finding me guilty then I suggest that you can still mitigate the injustice this court has perpetrated by giving me the most lenient sentence possible. Thank you.

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Editor's note: On Tuesday, June 27, 2023, Fr. Fidelis Moscinski, CFR, was sentenced to 6 months in federal prison for his attempt to rescue unborn babies at a Planned Parenthood abortion facility in Hempstead, Long Island, in the summer of 2022.

Photo: B. Musich