It is likely that the Department of Justice (DOJ) will be throwing an elderly survivor of a communist concentration camp in federal prison for sitting in a wheelchair in the hallway of an abortion business and singing church hymns.
A bench trial at the Fred Thompson Federal Courthouse in Nashville this past week lasted just one day.
By the end of it on April 2, four Christians were convicted of a misdemeanor FACE law violation. The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) law prohibits anyone from obstructing, intimidating, or interfering with a woman seeking an abortion.
They had been charged after singing hymns, praying, and persuading women not to abort their babies on March 5, 2021, at the now-defunct Carafem Health Center in Mount Juliet, Tennessee. The DOJ characterized the action as an illegal “blockade.”
The abortion business closed after a change in Tennessee law, prohibiting abortion in most cases. It means that the defendants are guilty of trying to stop what is now effectively outlawed in that state.
The four found guilty are Eva Zastrow, 25, of Michigan; James Zastrow, 27, of Missouri; Paul Place, 26, of Tennessee, and Eva Edl, 89, of South Carolina, who was in a wheelchair on the day of the incident.
Each faces up to a year in prison. They remain free until their July sentencing. But Ms. Zastrow and Ms. Edl have multiple FACE charges. They will go to a Michigan court in August, where each could get up to an additional 11 years in prison on a more aggressive FACE charge.
In January, six other defendants were found guilty of FACE and felony conspiracy (for social media posts showing what they were doing) for the same Tennessee incident. Each of the six could get up to 11 years in prison when they’re sentenced in July. More people are headed to trial for the same action.
Victim of Communism
Ms. Edl has been a longtime peaceful activist at abortion clinics, motivated by her traumatic childhood in communist Yugoslavia. She was removed from her home with her family. They were allowed to keep only a dish and the clothing they wore.She recalled being stuffed into a cattle car and shipped to a camp where she nearly starved to death while she watched the people around her die. As a child, she watched the dead being put on wagons and then buried in mass graves.
“We were considered to be nonhuman, with just permission given for torturing and killing us by the government,” Ms. Edl told an interviewer with WJBF television in 2018.
Our government’s legalizing abortion does not make it right or good, Ms. Edl told The Epoch Times in a 2023 interview.
“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,” Ms. 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. 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 said abortion businesses are “America’s 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,” Ms. 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.”
