War Against Women

Child Brides "sold" in Afghanistan

According to a BBC news site item, girls as young as nine years old are being married to older men in northern Afghanistan in exchange for food and other goods.

Badakhshan's independent MP Fauzia Kofi says she has seen an increasing number of such child brides in the last two years.

"I don't call it marriage, I call it selling children," she says.

"A nine or 10-year-old - you give her away for wheat and two cows."

The reason given for this atrocious use of female children is poverty. Government officials say the situation will not soon change because Afghanistan is a poor country, and Badakhshan is its poorest province.

But, I don't think it's poverty. Poverty may be the environment in which the family choosing to do this to their girl children makes the choice. But, it's not just poverty. It's the valuing of women and children that makes them choose to sell the child into sexual, reproductive, and labor slavery. And, slavery is what it is. These girls will live or die by their reproductive organs.
 

A midwife in the village of Khordakhan, Hanufa Mah, says she tries to teach parents not to marry their girls too young but some feel they have no choice.

One girl she helped through labour was only 10 years old. 

"The girl was so small. I held her in my lap until the child was born," she says.

UN figures show that more women die in childbirth in Badakhshan than anywhere else in the world, and mothers under the age of 15 are most at risk.

The girls of Afghanistan are being sold and made to have babies because of their religious and cultural background as well as because of poverty.

What can you do to help those girls and others like them around the world?

Abortion Ban In Nicaragua

Nicaraguan President Enrique Bolanos has signed into law a ban on all abortions, even in cases when a woman's life is judged to be at risk.

There will be no more exceptions like the case of nine year old girl, raped and four months pregnant, whose parents wanted to save her from carrying the pregnancy to term and managed to secure an abortion for her.

Her parents and doctors who carried out the procedure were excommunicated from the Roman Catholic church and prosecutors threatened to bring charges against those responsible.

Nicaraguan Roman Catholic bishops wrote an open letter to the government asking whether there was any real difference between abortion and terrorist suicide bombings.

Well, they won, and now all women and children who become pregnant via rape and/or are in danger from pregnancy will have to be aborted by illegal means, leave the country for an abortion if they have the money, or carry the pregnancy to term and/or die.