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WisconsinChristianNews.com
Volume 25, Issue 8
Pro-Life Christian Detained for Preaching Gospel, Offering to Adopt Babies at Abortion Clinic
By Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell, The Daily Signal January 2025 Police detained a pro-life father and husband outside an Ohio abor- tion clinic for sharing the Gospel and offering to adopt abortion- minded women’s babies. Still, he plans to return to the clinic again. Zack and Lindsay Knotts have spent the past three Saturdays out- side Northeast Ohio Women’s Cen- ter in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, an hour drive from their home in Youngstown. The Christian couple takes turns using amplified sound to preach the Gospel, plead with mothers to choose life, and offer women free resources. They even volunteer to adopt the women’s ba- bies themselves. “I will preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” Zack Knotts told The Daily Signal. “I will warn people of the wrath to come if they don’t repent. But I always say that there’s good news. There’s hope for you in Christ.” “We have free resources avail- able,” he continued. “We contacted an adoption agency, a couple of pregnancy resource centers, and got some of their information. We have folders with literally every- thing they could need if they were able to come talk to us, and we hold it up in the air.” On December 28, police detained Knotts for disorderly conduct. Dur- ing their first two weeks at the clinic, Zack and Lindsay Knotts stood on the sidewalk and spoke to women using a sound-amplifying headset. On December 28, they used a megaphone. Zack Knotts said he called the po- lice department before going to the clinic with sound-amplification de- vices and confirmed Cuyahoga Falls had no objective noise ordi- nance with a decibel limit. Shortly before the Knotts were about to go home on Saturday, four police officers said they would ar- rest Zack Knotts unless he walked with them to the police car. “My first emotion was just pure shock,” Lindsay Knotts told The Daily Signal. “He was standing
there on the public sidewalk, plead- ing with these escorts, with the women, telling them about the good news of the Gospel, that they can be forgiven, that we have free re- sources for them.” The Cuyahoga Falls Police De-
The Knotts are willing to adopt the baby of an abortion-minded women because they believe it would exemplify the Gospel, just as Christians were adopted into God’s family. “One of the greatest things that
natural encounter with God in a Planned Parenthood [clinic].” Zack Knotts thinks the law was unequally applied against him, but not enforced against the abortion clinics’ escorts, who walk women from their cars into the abortion clinic. He said the escorts loudly played kazoos to drown out his and his wife’s advocacy, but they weren’t cited for disorderly con- duct. “The law was applied to me and not to the others, the escorts that were clearly in violation of that law, even though I don’t like the way the law is written, and it’s unconstitu- tional,” Knotts said. “It would have been fair if they would have cited us all, but they only picked on me, and eventually, I do want to file suit against the police department, the officers, for violating my First and Fourth Amendment rights, because if they do it to me, they’ll do it to anybody.” “It’s about, at this point, standing up for ourselves and our rights in general,” he continued, “because if we don’t take a stand now, they’ll continue to pick on us and take it away.” Unequal application of the law against pro-lifers has become com- monplace in recent years. Since 2021, the Biden-Harris ad- ministration’s Justice Department has brought criminal or civil cases under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, against at least 50 pro-life advo- cates. President Joe Biden’s critics have accused him and his DOJ of weaponizing the FACE Act against pro-lifers while failing to charge pro-abortion criminals for the hun- dreds of attacks on pregnancy re- source centers and churches since the May 2022 leak of the draft Supreme Court opinion indicating that the 1973 Roe v. Wade court ruling legalizing abortion nation- wide was about to be overturned. “This story is an example of why we need to fight and we need to stand up now,” Lindsay Knotts said, “or the oppression will just get worse.”
partment declined to comment. The minor misdemeanor citation obtained by The Daily Signal ac- cuses Zack Knotts of “knowingly generat[ing] unreasonable noise by means of a megaphone, causing in- convenience and alarm to passersby at the women’s clinic.” Nonetheless, the Knotts family plans to return to the clinic to speak with women again. “We’ve been married for five years this year,” Zach Knotts said, “but we finally just got to a point where we broke and couldn’t stay silent anymore.” He said he can’t afford to hire a lawyer and is waiting to hear back from Christian legal aid groups. At his first court appearance he pleaded not guilty. He has a hear- ing on Jan. 9. The Knotts offer the women walk- ing into the clinic all the support they need to keep their child or put it up for adoption after it is born. “We don’t want you just to give birth,” Zack Knotts said. “We want you to be able to actually have suc- cess as a mother and overcome any situation you’re in.”
we think we could do to demon- strate that is to adopt a child that would have otherwise been mur- dered, bring them into a family that will love them, will show them Christ, will give them everything that they need,” he said. The Knotts have a 3-year-old and would love to adopt another baby. “Knowing God used us to save that baby, that would be the great- est thing in the world, the greatest victory of our lives,” he said, “to hold the baby that week the Lord used us to help stay alive.” The issue of abortion is personal for the Knotts because her mom al- most aborted her. The Lord saved her life, she says. “She made her appointment with Planned Parenthood to get an abor- tion, and when she went in for her appointment that day, the Lord lit- erally, supernaturally, intervened and showed her a vision of what was going on there,” Lindsay Knotts said. “She wasn’t a Christian at the time, so it was totally foreign to her, and she ran out of the Planned Par- enthood screaming, and that’s why I’m alive today, because of a super-
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