12 Year Old Dies In Child Birth
12 Year Old Dies In Child Birth along with her baby. In Yemeni girls are forced everyday to marry and forced to have sex with their husbands.
In a land where there are no laws to govern such an act, this is an every day occurrence. In an area when more than 50 percent of all married women are under the age of 18, this is common practice.
In February of 2009, due to world wide out cry, The Yemeni parliament tried to pass a law, setting the minimum marriage age at 17. But the measure has not reached the president because many parliamentarians argued it violates sharia, or Islamic law, which does not stipulate a minimum age.
Of course these laws and parliament are run by men.
This particular Yemeni girl, Fawziya Ammodi, 12, was forced into marriage at age 11, died during a painful childbirth, were she literally bleed to death. Her labor lasted for three days and also killed her baby.
“Although the cause of her death was lack of medical care, the real case was the lack of education in Yemen and the fact that child marriages keep happening,” said Seyaj President Ahmed al-Qureshi.
The fact is that many child brides are born into an impoverished families in Hodeidah. That is no bodies fault.
Fawziya Ammodi a 12 Year Old Dies In Child Birth. She was also forced to drop out of school and then married off to a 24 year old man last year. The result, her death and the death of her child.
Child brides are commonplace in Yemen, especially in the Red Sea Coast where tribal customs hold sway. Even though Hodeidah is the fourth largest city in Yemen and an important port, these backward practices still continue..
More than half of all young Yemeni girls are married off before the age of 18, mostly to older men, some with more than one wife. It is not the fact that these standards do not fit with western culture, it is the fact of what it is doing to the young women and children of this area.
A basically poor area, daughter are looked on as a financial piece of property. Financially strapped parents offer up their daughters for hefty dowries, many times saving the whole family, from the dowries.
Marriage also means that the girls are no longer a financial or moral burden to their parents and even though the parents will extract a promise from the husband to wait until the girl is older to consummate the marriage…the girls are then out of their control and the husbands will do as they please with their young wives…here in western culture, that still constitutes rape and is very hard for our culture to understand.
UNICEF issued a statement October 12th, 2009, that reported, “Child marriages violate the rights of children in the most deplorable way. The younger the girl is when she becomes pregnant, the greater the health risks for her and her baby.”
“Girls who give birth before the age of 15, are five times more likely to die in childbirth than women in their 20s. Child marriage denies girls of their childhood, deprives them of an education and robs them of their innocence.”
“More must be done to address the underlying causes in order to prevent tragic deaths like those of 12-year-old Fawziya and her baby,” the statement continued.
For the full story of “12 Year Old Dies In Child Birth,” go to CNN News. Our condolences go out to the friends and family of Fawziya Ammodi.
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