WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump signed pardons Thursday for 23 anti-abortion protesters whom the White House said were prosecuted under his predecessor Joe Biden\u2019s administration.
\n\u201cThey should not have been prosecuted. Many of them are elderly people,\u201d Trump told reporters in the Oval Office the day before a major anti-abortion march in Washington.
\n\u201cThis is a great honor to sign this.\u201d
\nAn aide at the ceremony said the pardoned people were \u201cpeaceful pro-life protesters\u201d but the White House did not immediately release more details on them.
\nUS media said the protesters were convicted of blocking access to abortion clinics.
\nRepublican Trump is reportedly due to address the \u201cMarch for Life\u201d in Washington on Friday by video, while Vice President JD Vance is set to appear in person.
\nTrump has recently kept his position on the politically explosive issue of abortion deliberately vague.
\nWhile the US Christian right has called for federal restrictions on the practice, Trump has said he wants to leave the issue to individual US states to decide.
\nBut he has repeatedly claimed credit for the 2022 ruling by the US Supreme Court \u2014 conservative-dominated thanks to justices appointed during his first term \u2014 that overturned the nationwide federal right to abortion.
\nSince the Supreme Court ruling, at least 20 US states have brought in full or partial restrictions on abortion.
\nTrump has reached out to his base with a series of pardons since starting his second presidential term on Monday.
\nWithin hours of his inauguration, he pardoned some 1,500 people accused of involvement in the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol by supporters trying to overturn his election loss to Biden.
\nTrump then on Wednesday pardoned two police officers who were convicted over the death of a 20-year-old Black man in a car chase in Washington in 2020.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump signed pardons Thursday for 23 anti-abortion protesters whom the White House said were prosecuted under his predecessor Joe Biden\u2019s administration. \u201cThey should not have been prosecuted. Many of them are elderly people,\u201d Trump told reporters in the Oval Office the day before a major anti-abortion march in Washington. \u201cThis is …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":76042,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76029"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76029\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76043,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76029\/revisions\/76043"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}