The Department of Justice (DOJ) is probably going to throw an old communist concentration camp survivor into federal prison for using a wheelchair in an abortion clinic’s hallway and humming religious hymns.
In the first week of April, a bench trial at Nashville’s Fred Thompson Federal Courthouse lasted just one day.
Four Christians were found guilty of a misdemeanor FACE Law violation by the end of it on April 2. It is illegal for anybody to impede, threaten, or otherwise interfere with a woman seeking an abortion, according to the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) law.
They had been accused of crimes at the now-closed Carafem Health Center in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, after leading prayers, singing hymns, and convincing ladies not to abort their children. The move was described as an illegal “blockade” by the DOJ.
Following a change in Tennessee law that outlawed abortion in most circumstances, the abortion business closed. It implies that the defendants are guilty of attempting to halt what is essentially forbidden in that state at this point.
Eva Edl, 89, of South Carolina, who was using a wheelchair on the day of the incident, James Zastrow, 27, of Missouri, Paul Place, 26, of Tennessee, and Eva Zastrow, 25, of Michigan were the four people found guilty.
Each might spend up to a year behind bars. Until their July sentencing, they are still at large. Eva Edl and Eva Zastrow, however, are charged with several FACEs. On a more serious FACE charge, each of them may receive an additional 11 years in jail when they appear in court in Michigan in August.
For the same Tennessee event, six other defendants were found guilty in January of felony conspiracy and FACE (for posting on social media about what they were doing). At their sentencing in July, each of the six faces a maximum sentence of 11 years in jail. For the same offense, more people are going to trial.
President Biden established the Reproductive Rights Task Force, a DOJ-led organization that has strengthened the FACE Law’s enforcement following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Inspired by her horrific upbringing in communist Yugoslavia, Ms. Edl has long been a nonviolent protestor at abortion facilities. She and her family were taken from their home. All they could take with them was a plate and their clothes.
She remembers being put into a cattle vehicle and sent to a camp, where she saw people around her perish and almost starved to death. She saw the corpses being loaded onto wagons and interred in mass graves as a little child.
“We were considered to be non-human, with just permission given for torturing and killing us by the government,” Edl told an interviewer with WJBF television in 2018.
In a 2023 interview she told the Epoch Times that the government’s legalizing abortion does not make it right or good.
“If it is right for the American government to legalize the killing of innocent human beings inside the womb, preborn babies, then why do we condemn the Nazis who also legalized the extermination of born people—Jews, Gypsies, and others—all unwanted individuals,” Edl said.
“If it is a good thing to kill human beings just as long as the government says so, then we have no right to condemn anybody else. But we all know deep down that these things are evil.”
“Nobody’s life is ultimately safe in a nation ruled by someone who does not respect all human life, from conception to natural death,” she continued. ”It will just depend on who is in power, and whose whim will dictate who is permitted to live, and who is going to be exterminated.”
She called compared abortion businesses to death camps.
“When I was on the cattle car with all my people, and we were shipped to the death camp to be exterminated, the people around us were not in agreement with what the government did. But they were intimidated,” Edl said.
“We have to overcome that fear and do what is right anyhow. … I wished in those days that somebody would have cared enough to go stand on those railroad tracks and say, ‘You cannot take these babies and children unless you go over our dead bodies.’
“If more and more would just lay down their lives and be willing to at least go to jail to protect these babies, we would have more success. But then, who knows what the Lord will do. Maybe he will honor even the sacrifice of the few. I’m always hopeful.”
This is another crucial read that has an impact on Christians’ freedoms and rights. They will be better able to tell their story later if they clamp down on Christians now. This is particularly true if they try to have another hateful summer like the one that occurred in 2020.
What an evil empire we are living in where it is fine to kill unborn babies but it is not fine to pray outside the clinics where the murder is happening.