“We haven’t done anything wrong! Who would harm us?” 88-year-old Eva Edl recalls her mother saying as a result of communist oppression in post-World War II Yugoslavia.
“Then our whole people was destroyed,” Edl said. “We hadn’t done anything wrong, as far as I know.”
Edl is like so many who escaped to America to flee communist oppression, only to find the same kind of evil beginning here.
Unlike most refugees who warn of yesteryear’s dangerous political and philosophical practices creeping into the U.S., Edl is experiencing them herself.
And she expects to die in prison after being found guilty along with three others of violating the federal FACE Act, designed to preserve access to abortion centers.
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She faces a possible sentence of 11 years, she said.
Edl’s suffering under communism is what drives her fight against abortion. It began with her shock in discovering the ramifications of the procedure.
Arriving in the U.S. in 1955, it was not until taking a class in English in 1968 that she learned about the debate then going on over abortion, according to an in-depth story on Edl by Mary Margaret Olohan in The Daily Signal.
Until her 1968 class, Edl said she didn’t know what abortion was. Upon learning about it, she said she was shocked. Unborn babies are not tumors, she told Olohan; rather, an unborn baby is a life.
Should the government send people to jail for peacefully protesting outside an abortion clinic?
“I tried to speak up in that subject,” Edl recalled, “but I must have done a very bad job, because I don’t think I convinced the person that I was speaking with.
“And after that,” she continued, “I just brought the subject up all the time because it bothered me that people would actually think of killing their own children.”
Her observation is colored by what happened in 1944 to her and other members of a German-speaking ethnic group, the Danube Swabians, when pounced upon in Yugoslavia by communists led by Josip Broz, better known as Tito.
Caught up on the extermination end of a genocidal fervor, Edl and her family were shipped off in cattle cars similar to what Nazis had been doing to Jews and others.
Disease and starvation killed many at the communist Yugoslavian concentration camp she ended up at.
She was 9 years old at the time. Edl told of how her mother, a slave laborer, risked her life hiding in a wagon to find her daughter among thousands at the camp.
They were reunited, though upon seeing her daughter so emaciated and covered with lice, Edl’s mother had to leave to go vomit.
Edl praised her grandmother, who voluntarily went to the camp to protect her; described her sister who, having been forced to dig a grave for herself, looked directly into a soldier’s eye and dared him to kill her, which he refused to do, and she told of the risks her mother took to get her children to the U.S.
All that ties directly into her feelings about abortion and how America could partake in such gruesome bloodshed.
“America, in my eyes, was this country of justice and opportunity and everything that is good,” Edl said. “A beacon for us, over there, that didn’t know what all that meant, because we had nothing but oppression from whoever was ruling us at the time.”
It wasn’t until 1988 that she learned abortions didn’t take place in dank, obscure places, but in well-appointed, air-conditioned clinics.
So she got involved. With the blessing of her late husband, Edl joined a protest at an Atlanta abortion center, working to convince women not to follow through with the procedure.
In the genocide in her country, the people could have resisted and stopped the trains, she said. They could have created a distraction that would allow others to free people in the cattle cars.
“But nobody did,” she told Olohan.
“So, when we place our bodies between the woman and the clinic, we buy time to get our sidewalk counselors the opportunity to speak with women, and hopefully open their hearts with love for their babies and let their babies live,” Edl said.
“After all, we offer them everything there is, including adoptions. I’ve offered to adopt babies on the spot … we’re standing between the killer and the victim.”
Over the years, Edl has been involved in incidents at 50 abortion clinics, engaged in what activists for decades have described as attempted “rescues” of babies.
“We would put our bodies in front of the entrance of the abortion clinic, which I call the ‘death camp,’ so nobody could come in and kill the babies,” she told the Daily Signal.
Edl has been charged three times for violating the FACE act — in 2020 in the Detroit suburb of Sterling Heights, Michigan, and in 2021 in Saginaw, Michigan, and Nashville, Tennessee.
Edl said she did not engage in violence in those incidents.
Earlier this month, a federal judge found Edl guilty of being involved in a “blockade” of a suburban Nashville abortion center, along with James and Eva Zastrow and Paul Place.
The verdict was confirmed by United States Attorney Henry Leventis for the Middle District of Tennessee and Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, both Biden appointees.
“…the defendants violated the FACE Act by using physical obstruction over the course of several hours to interfere with the clinic’s employees and a patient, because the clinic was providing, and the patient sought, reproductive health services…,” according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Middle District of Tennessee.
“These defendants positioned themselves directly in front of the main clinic door for over two hours, physically blocking access to the clinic, resulting in no patients accessing the clinic,” the release said.
Edl has said police have been especially brutal in arresting abortion protesters.
Pushed by the late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), the FACE Act – Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances — was signed into law in 1994, as a protection against abortion centers. It also contains protections for churches and for pro-life centers.
But under the Biden administration – especially after the overturning of Roe v. Wade – the FACE act has been increasingly weaponized against abortion opponents despite vandalism against churches and pro-life centers, The Daily Signal reported.
That’s even though the Department of Justice claims the “The FACE Act is not about abortions,” but is designed to protect pregnancy support facilities as well.
As a result of the weaponization, some conservative legislators are calling for the law’s repeal.
