Police detained a pro-life father and husband outside an Ohio abortion clinic for sharing the Gospel and offering to adopt abortion-minded women’s babies. Still, he plans to return to the clinic this weekend.
Zack and Lindsay Knotts have spent the past three Saturdays outside Northeast Ohio Women’s Center 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 babies 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 available,” he continued. “We contacted an adoption agency, a couple of pregnancy resource centers, and got some of their information. We have folders with literally everything they could need if they were able to come talk to us, and we hold it up in the air.”
On Saturday, police detained Knotts for disorderly conduct. During 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 Saturday, they used a megaphone.
Zack Knotts said he called the police department before going to the clinic with sound-amplification devices and confirmed Cuyahoga Falls had no objective noise ordinance with a decibel limit.
Shortly before the Knotts were about to go home on Saturday, four police officers said they would arrest 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, pleading with these escorts, with the women, telling them about the good news of the Gospel, that they can be forgiven, that we have free resources for them.”
The Cuyahoga Falls Police Department declined to comment.
The minor misdemeanor citation obtained by The Daily Signal accuses Zack Knotts of “knowingly generat[ing] unreasonable noise by means of a megaphone, causing inconvenience and alarm to passersby at the women’s clinic.”
Nonetheless, the Knotts family plans to return to the clinic on Saturday 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 on Thursday, he pleaded not guilty. He has a hearing on Jan. 9.
The Knotts offer the women walking 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 success as a mother and overcome any situation you’re in.”
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 we think we could do to demonstrate that is to adopt a child that would have otherwise been murdered, 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 greatest 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 almost aborted her. The Lord saved her life, she says.
“She made her appointment with Planned Parenthood to get an abortion, and when she went in for her appointment that day, the Lord literally, 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 Parenthood screaming, and that’s why I’m alive today, because of a supernatural 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 conduct.
“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 unconstitutional,” 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 commonplace in recent years.
Since 2021, the Biden-Harris administration’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 advocates.
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 hundreds of attacks on pregnancy resource 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 nationwide 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.”
