PREEMPTIVE LOVE

Violence unmakes the world. Preemptive love unmakes violence. Follow the impassioned efforts of the Courtney family, their team, and the Preemptive Love Coalition as they help the tens of thousands of Iraqi children waiting for life-saving heart surgery.

In the summer of 2007, Jeremy and Jessica Courtney found themselves with their two children in the middle of Iraq, haunted by their encounter with a little girl dying of a heart defect. The Courtneys soon learned that her condition wasn’t unique; more than 30,000 children across Iraq are in desperate need of heart surgery—in a country with no pediatric heart surgeons. Faced with this staggering statistic, Jeremy, Jessica, and a team of friends decided they had to find a way to help these children. But their mission proved to be more challenging than expected. Sending children abroad for surgery is expensive, cumbersome, and fails to address the systemic needs of local hospitals—the place where these children really should be saved. Through deaths, bombings, imprisonments, and intense living conditions in Iraq, Jeremy writes a firsthand account of his team’s lifesaving and peacemaking efforts in the world’s most notorious war-torn country. Preemptive Love needs no exaggeration to make its point: In the heart of conflict, there is only one rule big enough to change a nation—love first, ask questions later.
Jeremy Courtney is the founder and executive director of the Preemptive Love Coalition (PLC), an international development organization based in Iraq that provides lifesaving heart surgeries to Iraqi children and trains local doctors and nurses. Jeremy resides in Iraq with his wife, two children, and an indispensable team of dear friends.