Mr Preston, a member of the pro-life group Protect Life, has already served a total of 10 months in jail over five separate terms, mostly in Brisbane’s maximum security Arthur Gorrie Correctional Centre. This time he is not due out until Christmas. It is the longest jail term received by an Australian pro-life activist. The following account was written by his wife, Liz Preston.

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The Preston family

My husband went to jail this week. For eight months. His crime? Sitting down. Yes, I know, sitting down is not usually regarded as being a crime and especially not one you go to jail for eight months for. But it depends on where you do it and how often.

My husband, Graham, along with a few others at different times, has sat down on dozens of occasions in recent years in front of the doors of Brisbane abortion clinics, and refused to move. He has not been charged with “sitting down” of course, but with things like trespass. But sitting down and refusing to move is all that he actually does.

I know that at this point some readers, when they see that he is opposed to abortion, will say that being sent to jail for such sit-ins is just what he deserves. But let’s try and think about this for a moment.

Graham, like myself and others, believes that when a woman is pregnant she is carrying a baby. There is surely nothing too controversial with that belief – I’ve carried a number of babies to term myself and I have no doubt that, yes, they really were babies that I was carrying.

Indeed, I would venture to say that every woman who is happily pregnant has no doubt that she is carrying a baby and there is always much delight in viewing the ultrasound images. If the baby should be lost through spontaneous miscarriage, then there is usually considerable grief at that loss.

Further, Graham, like myself and others, believes that abortion deliberately ends the life of the baby that is being carried in the womb. Again, this should hardly be a controversial claim: as noted above, pregnancy involves the carrying of a baby in the womb, so if an abortion is carried out, that means a baby’s life is deliberately taken.

So, back to where this article started: if a child is about to be killed, everyone should try to save that child’s life. Right? Well, yes, normally, but apparently not if the child we are talking about saving is a child that is scheduled to be killed by abortion.

In the minds of some, if the mother or parents of a preborn child decide that they want to have an abortion, then their child loses absolutely all right to have their life protected. But not everyone is prepared to simply turn away and abandon such children to death. And not without good reason either.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which Australia is a signatory, states in the opening paragraph of the Preamble: ” . . . recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world” (emphasis added).

Article 3 of the Declaration reads: “Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person.” (emphasis added).

The Convention on the Rights of the Child (1990), to which Australia is also a signatory, reaffirms in the Preamble the following statement from the earlier Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959): ” . . . the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, both before as well as after birth.” (emphasis added)

However the reality in Australia today is that, regardless of Australia being a signatory to the above documents, there is effectively no legal protection given to the child before birth. If a woman wants to end her child’s life by abortion, so long as she has the money to pay for it, she can visit an abortion clinic and readily get it done. About 90 to 100 000 babies are killed by abortion in Australia each year.

Yet here in Queensland, if a person should assault a pregnant woman and subsequently her child dies, the assailant can be punished with life imprisonment – the same penalty that is given for killing a born person.

So we have a situation where a preborn child’s life is regarded as being as valuable as anyone else’s life – if the mother wants the child – but if the mother does not want the child, then somehow the child, apparently, loses all value and rights and can be killed by abortion.

But it is a well-recognised injustice for the value and rights of one human being to be made dependent upon the say-so of one or more other human beings. At other times and places sub-sections of humanity, such as those who are Jewish or who have dark-coloured skin, have been deemed by others to be less than fully human and so could be made subject to death and enslavement.

Those attitudes are now almost totally rejected in our society, yet, incongruously, we live with the greatest of discriminations being openly practised against another sub-section of humanity – the preborn children. (Not to mention the harm that abortion can do to women.)

Well, not everybody is prepared to just live with such double standards.

Yes, my husband and the others have been found to be breaking the law in their efforts to come to the defence of children who are scheduled to be aborted. It is clearly no small thing for them to defy the law and do so over and over again. Yet laws, which allow for the wholesale destruction of innocent human life, cannot be taken to be absolute.

As Martin Luther King Jr wrote in his famous letter from Birmingham jail, ” . . . there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

Yes, if a child is about to be killed, all of us should try to save the child – even if we are sent to jail for doing so.

Since I’m roughly 90 years old, getting a grasp on the Twitter and figuring out what to do with it has generally proved too much for me.  Right now, my basic philosophy is, “If you follow me, I’ll follow you back as long as your profile picture isn’t a. the default egg or b. featuring a mostly naked person.”  I don’t really seek out people to follow, since, again, I’m 90 years old and can’t figure out what the Twitter is supposed to do for me.

However, I have sought out a few people to follow.  There’s Jim Gaffigan, and Stephan Colbert, because I’m Catholic and I have a sense of humor, so that means I’m morally obligated to follow them.  Other than that, the only other people I’ve sought out to follow have been pro-life organizations and people.  Think: the usual suspects- Lila Rose, Jill Stanek, Live Action, Life Site News, etc. etc.

And they’re the Twitter feed people I need to rethink.

They’re good at using the Twitter.  They know how to lead stories to get you to click on their links.  They know how to rebroadcast tweets to get optimal attention.  They also, generally speaking, bring me the most horrifying and gut-wrenching chatter on my feed.  It’s so easy and tempting to read story after story of the most casual and illogical assaults on human life and end up banging your head on your desk, too miserable to even click over to Cakewrecks for a little uplifting diversion.

But every time I find myself hovering over the “unfollow” button, I force myself to remember what God was able to do to my stubborn heart in the course of a single run more than six years ago.

****

My parents, as all parents are responsible for doing, instilled certain values in me.  This is what conscientious parents do.

People who claim that passing along specific religious, political, moral and ethical viewpoints to children is “indoctrination” are either not parents, or else parents who aren’t thinking about the words they’re saying.  So I’ll say it here:  The world is not going to keep its religion, politics, morals or ethics from a child, so why should a parent?  By saying that parents should “let a child choose for himself” out of the gate, what you’re really saying is, “let the culture consume this child,” because that’s what’s going to happen.

The values of my youth included such things as: the efficacy and necessity of labor unions, a strong and honest work ethic, the artistic genius of British Comedy, and support for abortion.  In my house, a woman’s “right” to “control her body” was a non-issue.  In fact, unlike labor unions and the primacy of British comedy, the possibility that there was another option to a pro-abortion stance wasn’t even discussed.  I don’t think I was even aware that some people were anti-abortion until I was in high school.

Now, in addition to instilling values acceptable to the family unit, parents should teach their children to think critically.  At some point, the child is going to establish an identity of his own, and he needs to have the skills to be able to analyze new ideas and discern their worth.

I know.  This parenting gig is harder than Jim Gaffigan lets on.

So when the time came for me to begin examining the values of my childhood, there were a number of things in the way of an honest critique of abortion.

1. lack of opposing viewpoints.

Like I said, I don’t think I even personally encountered someone who identified as anti-abortion until high school, and then it was only one person.  There may have been more of my peers who were pro-life, but none that I could identify as such.  I more or less existed in an echo chamber, as far as life issues were concerned, and there was little to challenge my way of thinking.

2. image issues.

Anti-abortion activists were painted as religious crazies.  They were tools of the patriarchy.  They wanted to control every aspect of women’s private lives.  This was before the Internet, so this image was easy to maintain, when main stream media was King.  Now, with so many fantastic organizations able to circumvent traditional media outlets, they’re able to control their image and help people realize that anti-abortion doesn’t equal spittle flecked loonie trying to bomb the local Planned Parenthood.

3. contraceptive culture.

Like every other person brought up in a post-Pill world, the thought that sex wasn’t primarily for pleasure was a foreign one.  With seemingly endless birth control choices at our fingertips, if a human being would be so rude as to get conceived without the woman’s consent, abortion seemed like the obvious way to restore justice and sanity to a suddenly unjust and insane situation.

4. lack of personal experience/poor understanding of human development.

Again, before the advent of the Internet as we know it, images of fetal development were not as easy to come by as they are now.  Right this second, in the privacy of my own home, I can run a Google search and come up with hundreds of pictures of human life in all stages of development, learn that the heart begins beating at 21 days, and that from the moment of conception, a set of DNA, entirely distinct from either sperm cell or egg cell is present.  It’s a lot harder now to maintain the “fetus as a parasite/clump of cells/tumor/etc.” fiction than it used to be.

So for most of my life, my pro-abortion views were relatively unchallenged.  And then, two things happened.

The first was when a friend of mine told me about an abortion she had.  She certainly wasn’t my only friend who’d had one, but she was the first one who ever discussed it with me.  Over drinks at a restaurant, she told me about it, and couldn’t stop crying over something that she had chosen to do with her body to a clump of cells over 10 years ago.  I remember my heart breaking for her, not because she’d had an abortion, but because she was still so obviously shaken and sad about it.  I remember thinking that I could have just as easily been in her shoes.  I was sexually active outside of marriage, and had I gotten pregnant at that time, I don’t know if I would have viewed my options any differently than she had.

I don’t remember what I said to her.  I pray that even then, while I was still in a spiritual wilderness, the Holy Spirit worked through me to bring the light of Christ to her.  I don’t know, though.  But I do know that every time I hear someone condemning a post-abortive woman, and not the action, I remember the pain my friend still carries around, and I know that but by the grace of God I could be there in her shoes today.

The second thing that happened was I got pregnant with my first child.

For the first time in my entire life, I had a front row seat to the whole spectacle of human development.  I saw the grey shaped peanut floating in my uterus at 9 weeks.  I saw the little cursor light of a heart flick on and off.  And while that first ultrasound did not grant me the mystical bond with my child that I’d hoped for, it still made it shockingly clear that there was someone else in there.  Not a tumor.  Not a clump of cells.  There was another human life, and no longer was it just my body occupying that space.

This marked my departure from unexamined support for abortion, and the move to the lukewarm “personally opposed, but…” camp.  I knew I could now never have an abortion, but I certainly wasn’t going to tell someone else what to do.  It seemed like a safe compromise over a hot button topic.  I could condemn it silently, but not have to mark myself as an object for scorn by making a universal condemnation about it.

Fast forward three years, and I’m now a mother of two, and in the process of converting to the Catholic church.  Easter Vigil was six months away, and I knew there were some loose ends that needed to be tied up.

I knew, with every single cell in my body, that I could not join the Church, could not receive the Communion I was so longing for, unless I was in Communion with the Church.  I understood that the Eucharist was not a sign of working toward unity, like it had been in the Protestant theology of my past, but that the Eucharist was the fruit of a unity already established.  When I stood in front of the parish at the Vigil Mass, I would be professing to believe all that the Church taught, and then consuming my first Holy Communion would be the promise my body made.

There was no way I was going to stand in front of God and lie to Him with my body.  If I was going to enter His Church, I needed to be in Communion with what it taught, or else walk away and find a Protestant church whose teachings I could accept. Those were my choices.

For the most part, this wasn’t a problem. The logic and constancy I found in Church teachings were one of the things that drew me to it, even in areas many people find difficult, like an all-male priesthood and the prohibition on contraception.  Each time I questioned a Church teaching, as long as the questions were honest inquiries about the topic, and not defensive posturing, the answer I received was clear, rational, and ultimately pointed toward a respect for human dignity that was shocking.

The one thing though, the last obstacle between me and the Church, was abortion.  Why wasn’t “personally opposed but….” good enough?  Why did the Church ask that I make a universal stand against abortion?

This was what I was grappling with one beautifully sunny October morning as I laced up my shoes and got ready for a run.

I was training for the Disney marathon, which was three months away.  Ken and I were both planning on running it, and we had worked out a nice running schedule.  It was my morning to train, and I had a good eight miles ahead of me.  Eight miles at the slow pace I run meant I had a solid hour and a half to fill with the sort of thoughts you use to distract yourself from the insanity of eight mile runs.

I knew as I trotted off down the street that my constant companion for the next eight miles would be this issue of personally pro-life vs. universally pro-life.  I had been round and round with myself on this topic for months, and I couldn’t see any new way of looking at it.  Then, as I rounded the first corner of my run, and started up the first hill, I managed this small, inelegant prayer, “God, you’ve brought me this far.  You know what I’m wrestling with here.  I trust that You’ve brought me this close to the Catholic Church for a reason.  I don’t understand why abortion is always wrong, in every case, so I can’t give you my understanding.  But I do give you my trust and my obedience.  Maybe it’s enough that You know it’s always wrong, and it’s enough that I trust that.”

And for a few moments, my soul was at peace.  My mind was at peace.  There was just the motion of my legs, and the rhythm of my breathing, and the giant flocks of blackbirds whirling overhead.

Then, softly, gently, I could feel a series of questions rising up in my mind, like the first rays of the sun coming over the horizon.  I can’t remember the precise questions, or the order they were asked (and I tried.  Trust me, I’ve spent the last 15 minutes staring at my monitor while two children nap and three more watch kung-fu cartoons downstairs, but I can’t remember these particular details), but as I answered each one, I found my reluctance to declare abortion a universally evil thing receding.  Each question my guardian angel (?)  the Holy Spirit (?) asked me not only revealed the flaws in a philosophy that recognized something as bad, but resisted speaking out against it, but also gave me the courage to act on this new understanding.

By the time those eight miles were done, God had helped me move from “personally opposed but…” to completely, unabashedly pro-life.    If I hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t have believed it.  Once again, I was faced with absolute proof that God was a gentleman who valued our free will so much that He would never force us to do anything.  It wasn’t until I had given God my obedience in this area of Church teaching that He flooded my heart with the graces necessary to understand it.  Anything else would have been a violation of my free will.  But once I indicated with that act of will that I was open to His word, He moved me a million miles closer to Him in the course of a single run.

And so whenever I contemplate hitting “unfollow” on Twitter because I can’t take the awful news about abortion that keeps coming across my feed, I remember what God can do with a single act of will and an eight mile run.

And so I keep following, and I keep praying.

In the pre-Islamic period, the practice of female infanticide was widespread in much of Arabia, but it was immediately forbidden through Islamic injunctions. Several verses of the Quran were revealed that prohibited this practice to protect the rights of the unborn and of the newborn child: “When the female infant, buried alive, is questioned for what crime was she killed; when the scrolls are laid open; when the World on High is unveiled; when the Blazing Fire is kindled to fierce heat; and when the Garden is brought near; Then shall each soul know what it has put forward. So verily I call” (81: 8-15). Indeed, there are many verses in the Quran that remind us of the sanctity of life. We are told that “Wealth and children are an adornment of this life” (18:46), and we are commanded to “Kill not your children for fear of want: We shall provide sustenance for them as well as for you. Verily the killing of them is a great sin” (17:31).

While the religious injunctions reverberate through faith on a spiritual level, the blessings of life touch us daily on a worldly level, as well. As the mother of three beautiful children, I can truly attest to and appreciate the gift of life. But I also understand how heartbreaking it is to lose it.

I want to share with you the story of how I came to realize life’s fragility and the importance of making the most of our spiritual journeys here on earth. Over thirteen years ago, my husband and I were eager to start our family. We were ecstatic when, a few months shy of our first anniversary, we found out that we were expecting. Very early on, we began playing the “new parent” planning game, picking out names and nursery colors even before our first doctor’s appointment.

A few months into the pregnancy, the doctor scheduled a routine ultrasound. Giddy with excitement, we entered the darkened room and waited in great anticipation to see our child. There on the screen—fuzzy, yet discernible—we could see our baby’s outline. We imagined the features and jokingly guessed who the baby might look like. But the ultrasound technician did not laugh with us. As she solemnly stared at the screen, we followed her gaze. As inexperienced as we were, we could tell that something was not right: our baby had no heartbeat.

After losing my first child, I truly began to understand the meaning of life. When the heartbeat we’d heard so clearly on the Doppler suddenly ceased, our baby’s life ended in the womb, before he or she even had a chance to begin in the outside world.

But strong faith and an unshakeable belief in a just God is a great formula for filling any emotional void. As the Quran states in Verse 156 of Surat Al-Baqara, there are great blessings for those “who, when a misfortune overtakes them, say: ‘Surely we belong to God and to Him shall we return.’” Losing our first baby led to a deeper appreciation of God’s magnificence and the miracle of His creation.

Several months later, we found out we were expecting again. This time, the excitement was tempered with worry. Our first ultrasound came much earlier in the pregnancy, and we eagerly scanned the screen for the telltale beating before glancing at fingers and toes or eyes and nose. And there it was, strong and steady! We breathed a sigh of relief. Our baby was alive.

As the months of this second pregnancy progressed and the baby bump grew larger, we began to hope. Each ultrasound revealed a little more of our child and each kick confirmed that this time we were really going to begin our family. As the due date quickly approached, we felt more confident in choosing baby items and room colors. We even chose the name for our baby girl. Her name would be Jennah, which means Heaven in Arabic.

With just a few weeks left before my scheduled delivery date, I went into labor. As we sped to the hospital and I was wheeled into the darkened ultrasound room, out of habit, my eyes went directly to the heart area on the screen that I knew all too well by now. That tiny heart, which I had sought out so many times in the previous ultrasounds, had stopped beating.

That day, so many years ago, I delivered Jennah, my stillborn daughter; and that day we buried Jennah. We hadn’t known how fitting her name would really be. As the infection that had ended the pregnancy sped through my blood in the days that followed, I recognized just how delicate life really is. Nothing can bring life into perspective as much as loss. And nothing can affirm faith as much as life.

Today, as I look at my three beautiful children, I know that God is good. No, God is great, or in Arabic, Allahu Akbar. And what gives me the greatest solace in times of trial is the verse in the Quran that states: “It may be that you detest something which is good for you; while perhaps you love something even though it is bad for you. God knows, while you do not know” (2:216).

As Muslims, we believe in the power of life to change others, and we believe even more in the power of God. In any disaster, in any calamity, and in the face of any death, we are urged to repeat “inna lilah wa inna ilayhee raji’un”—“To God we belong and to Him we return.” In the end, only He knows what is best for us.

I could share with you so many stories from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Quran that illustrate the power of God in our lives: the creation of Adam, the patience of Job, the perseverance of Noah, the purity of Joseph, the judiciousness of Solomon, the trials of Jonah, the obedience of Abraham, the wisdom of Moses, the devotion of Jesus, and the inspiration of Mohamed. I could share these stories with you, but they are available to all in the Holy Scriptures.

Instead, I want to share with you the story of an amazing woman whom I met recently at a conference. This woman truly exemplifies the spirit of respecting life. Melinda Weekes had recently returned from a trip to the Sudan, where she was helping to enact a policy of slave redemption. For years and years, a rampant genocide was perpetrated in southern Sudan by the wealthy slave traders of the north. They would pillage and torch the mud huts of the villagers, and then capture the women and children to sell them into slavery.

Heartbroken by what was happening in Sudan, this woman traveled across the world to help free these slaves by buying them back from the traders and returning them to their villages. Upon their return, she helped them rebuild their lives by establishing schools and educating their girls so that they could break free from oppression. Describing the strength of these women in the face of modern-day slavery, Melinda shared story after story of the things she had seen on her trips to Sudan. She spoke of one of the most powerful experiences she had had, when she sat with a woman who had lost her home, her husband, and her children, and had suffered incredible harm at the hands of her slave master. She asked the woman, “How do you survive? How do you manage to continue living?” The woman responded, “When the world pushed me down to my knees, I knew that it was time to pray. I am blessed to still have these old knees that allow me to kneel, blessed to be able to prostrate, blessed to be able to pray. And I am blessed because I have God.”

I ask you today to reflect on women like these, to reflect on their inner strength, and to reflect on your own life as you know it. I ask you to accept life as a gift and to understand that your life belongs to a greater power, to a higher authority that breathed life into your soul at your beginning and decreed that you should live it with good morals, good ethics, and a good heart that can truly make a difference in the lives of those around you.

In the memorable words of Mother Theresa:

Life is an opportunity, benefit from it.
Life is beauty, admire it.
Life is a dream, realize it.
Life is a challenge, meet it.
Life is a duty, complete it.
Life is a game, play it.
Life is a promise, fulfill it.
Life is sorrow, overcome it.
Life is a song, sing it.
Life is a struggle, accept it.
Life is a tragedy, confront it.
Life is an adventure, dare it.
Life is luck, make it.
Life is too precious, do not destroy it.
Life is life, fight for it.

I’d like to end with a prayer, a Muslim ayah (verse 286 from Suratul Baqara) from the Quran:

On no soul doth God place a burden greater than it can bear. It gets every good that it earns, and it suffers every ill that it earns. (Pray:) Our Lord! Condemn us not if we forget or fall into error; Our Lord! Lay not on us a burden like that which Thou didst lay on those before us; Our Lord! Lay not on us a burden greater than we have strength to bear. Blot out our sins, and grant us forgiveness. Have mercy on us. Thou art our Protector; help us against those who stand against faith.

I ask you today once again to respect life, for there is no greater gift. Respect life, yours and the lives around you. For when we lose respect for life, we lose respect for humanity, and when we lose respect for humanity, we lose respect for God’s creation, and when we lose that, we have lost everything.

Suzy Ismail is a Visiting Professor at DeVry University in North Brunswick, New Jersey and is the author of When Muslim Marriage Fails: Divorce Chronicles and Commentaries. This article has been adapted from remarks made in the Princeton University Chapel for Respect Life Sunday. It was originally published in Public Discourse.