Condemned Sudanese Christian Gives Birth in Prison, Won't Recant Faith

        

The Sudanese Christian woman under a death sentence for refusing to convert to Islam has given birth to a baby girl in the squalor of prison, but has reiterated that she will not renounce her faith in Christ.

Twenty-seven-year-old Meriam Yahia Ibrahim was convicted by a Muslim court April 30 of apostasy, as well as of adultery for marrying a Christian man, although she had been raised a Christian and had never embraced the Muslim faith. Her Muslim father abandoned the family and Ibrahim was raised by a Christian mother.
Ibrahim was eight months pregnant at the time of her conviction, and after refusing to convert to Islam was sentenced to death by hanging, as well as 100 lashes for the adultery conviction.

“I am a Christian, and I have never been a Muslim,” Ibrahim told Judge Abaas Al Khalifa in court. As an Islamic crowd shouted for the court to punish her, the judge responded, “The court sentences you to be hanged until you are dead."

Ibrahim had been confined to jail, along with her 20-month-old son, as she waited for the birth of her and husband Daniel Wani's second child. “I'm so frustrated, I don't know what to do,” Wani said of his wife's death sentence. “I'm just praying.”

After spending the past four months shackled to the floor of her cell, Ibrahim delivered her baby in the hospital wing of Sudan's Omdurman Federal Women’s Prison in North Khartoum. “This is some good news in what has been a terrible ordeal for Meriam,” Ibrahim's attorney, Mohamed Mustafa Elnour, told the U.K.'s Daily Mail newspaper. “I am planning to visit her with her husband Daniel later today. I think they are going to call the baby Maya.”

Elnour noted that prison officials “didn’t even take Meriam to a hospital. She just delivered inside a prison clinic. Neither her husband nor I have been allowed to see them yet.”