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A childhood survivor of both Nazi occupation and Communist concentration camps (gulags) is among eleven pro-life activists facing conspiracy charges for protesting abortion.

Eighty-seven-year-old Eva Edl, who miraculously lived to testify to the Soviets’ “anti-fascist” murderous persecution of Eastern Europeans with German heritage, told The Epoch Times,

“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.”

Eva asserted, “As Christians, if we really believe in Jesus Christ, [government intimidation] is no excuse.”

Now living in the United States, the war refugee said,

“We have to overcome that fear and do what is right anyhow. Then He helps us through it. I just wish, in those days, that somebody would have cared enough to go to in front of that gate and stand on those railroad tracks and say, ‘You cannot take these babies and children unless you go over our dead bodies.’”

Looking at a prison sentence of at least one year, Eva, reflecting Solzhenitsyn’s Live Not by Lies mantra, declared, “Speak the truth. And pay the price. Otherwise, you’re going to pay a price even worse.”

Arguing her case further, Eva likened widespread complacency to woke ideology, and the Far Left’s abuse of language, to life under Communism.

For her, all human life is precious, and the minute this is no longer the case, then “nobody’s life is ultimately safe.”

Especially “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,” she explained, “and whose whim will dictate who is permitted to live and who is going to be exterminated.”

New Regime

The eleven pro-life advocates were federally charged after being singled out by Joe Biden’s newly formed Reproductive Rights Task Force in October 2022.

RRTF is an organisation created in response to the Dodds v. Jackson Supreme Court decision ending Roe v. Wade.

They are a Democrat-led justice department initiative designed to ‘identify’ and ‘enforce’ any breaches to Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act legislation. A 1994 law that protects the medical practice of terminating the life of an unborn child for any reason, while prohibiting pro-life activists from counselling, praying, teaching, or breaching “safe space” buffer zones around abortion clinics.

According to information released by the Justice Department late last year, Eva Edl, along with ten others, were brought up on charges for ‘FACE act violations.’

Allegedly, the so-called ‘conspirators and co-conspirators utilised Facebook to coordinate travel and logistics’; as well as to ‘identify other participants for a blockade of the Carafem Health Center Clinic, in Mount Juliet, Tennessee.’

The centre’s abortion facilities are now closed.

Disregarding the closure, the FBI is still pursuing the eleven, accusing them of:

“Aiding and abetting one another, in the use of force and physical obstructions [with the intent] to injure, intimidate, and interfere with employees of the clinic and a patient who was seeking reproductive health services.”

Significantly, the team prosecuting the pro-life advocates is the Civil Rights Coordinator of the U.S. Attorney’s Office. They are acting in conjunction with both the FBI and Attorneys of the Department’s Civil Rights Division.

Harsh Penalties

The government moving from a FACE act violation to a civil rights violation charge shows the Biden administration’s slithery determination to placate its pro-abortion platform.

Lawyers from the Thomas More Society representing one of the potential political prisoners, Tennessee dad Paul Vaughn, said,

“The DOJ dug deep in their little bag of tricks, and found the conspiracy to violate civil rights statute. They then charged us with that one, which carries a sentence up to 10 years, not the ‘first-offense’ non-violent, 1-year for a FACE act violation.”

Alluding to reasons for the excessive use of force, senior counsel Stephen Crampton hinted in The Epoch Times exposé that the accused are being used to send a strong political message.

The political message being burned into the lives of these pro-life advocates is simple: “abortion is a civil right”, because the “abortion is healthcare”, pro-termination White House says it is.

In other words, “don’t mess with us, or there will be hell to pay!”

Similar cases of government overreach are popping up around the United States, with the most recent case involving an FBI SWAT team raiding the house of Mark Houck.

The father of eight was confronted by agents fully kitted for a siege, at his home one early September morning last year.

Houck, a pro-life counsellor, was arrested in front of his traumatised family on seemingly false accusations that he had assaulted a pro-abortion activist.

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Originally published at Caldron Pool.