"... 'we find that they want to have the abortion.' Some girls move away to other settlements and have their babies in secret. Some give birth and then abandon or kill their infants. Others try to end their pregnancies by taking ulcer drugs or local herbs; some dig up tree roots in an effort to make their own abortifacients. 'Sometimes, you hear they use Duracells,' he said, referring to a practice of steeping batteries in water and drinking the liquid... Although there are no reliable numbers on self-induced abortion in refugee camps, and no one knows exactly how many refugee women die of unsafe abortions every year, there is good reason to believe hazardous procedures are common. We do have solid data on the high rates of sexual violence against refugee women and girls: researchers have thoroughly documented this and, unsurprisingly, found links between rape and unplanned pregnancy. Worldwide, 61 percent of unplanned pregnancies end in abortion, and unsafe abortions cause an estimated 13 percent of pregnancy-related deaths worldwide. Every year, mothers who die from unsafe abortion leave behind some 220,000 children. Another five million women worldwide are hospitalized annually with complications from unsafe abortion; this is a phenomenon restricted almost exclusively to developing countries that limit abortion access."
From "How US Abortion Politics Distorts Women’s Lives in Conflict Zones/From Rwanda and Bosnia to Myanmar and Tigray, rape is now recognized as a genocidal crime. Yet its survivors rarely receive the health care they need—thanks to America’s deadly culture war" by Jill Filipovic (New York Review of Books).
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6 comments:
Temujin writes:
I'll throw one on top of this. Reading blogger Michael Yon who is regularly posting from the area of the Darien Gap which is a massive jungle and water landscape running from northern Colombia into Panama. He has spent time there, and in Mexico and along our southern border WITH the immigrant flows. The hundreds of thousands of immigrants trying to get to the US from South America come through the Darien Gap. Yon reports on families, or fathers with children or mothers with children, or just young women trying to get through this land. They are used, abused, 'escorted' by criminals using their bodies and taking their money. So many getting raped. and so many coming because of insane posturing and politicking by the Democrats currently running our country. It is a tortuous land to cross, by itself. Trying to avoid getting raped on top of it is absolute horror.
IF the media did it's job, this would be shown and discussed and these young people would get help. The trip they have undertaken is life-threatening just by the nature of it. But the evil infused into this by Coyotes raping and beating young women and boys is horrifying. CBS, NBC, CNN, ABC, and the NY Times, etc, are silent on this. The author can write about our policies affecting Myanmar? Seriously? Look to our own borders. Look south in our own hemisphere. The crime is there right in front of your face, but you won't speak it because of the Party narrative.
Tom T. writes:
The lives of women in combat zones seem pretty sadly distorted already, but why is this issue laid exclusively at the feet of the American right? Why can't Western Europe, Canada, and Australia step up with more abortion funding? Doctors Without Borders provides abortions, but doesn't like to talk about it -- why? Why isn't there an NGO that does this using contributions from the American left? Could it be that subsidizing thousands of abortions of fetuses of color gives people pause, even outside the American right?
As for women in "developing countries that limit abortion access," isn't that by definition an issue of their own domestic policy, and not US abortion politics?
And for that matter, other than Canada, are their any countries that don't limit abortion access in some way? In most European countries, for instance, abortion is permitted under significantly more narrow terms than in the US.
Finally, the counterfactual is easy to spin out. Imagine the headlines if the US did widely subsidize abortion in the third world: "These Countries Abort Many More Girls Than Boys -- Thanks To US Policy."
Washington Blogger writes:
The desire to make abortion an acceptable form of birth control has really distorted some people's priorities. If the rape and subsequent pregnancy, followed by the risk from abortion is such a horrible condition, why is it that the restriction on cleaning up after the atrocity the focus on the outrage? Why not focus on the atrocity itself? Why not spend capital on the front end and say how countries are failing these people by not making the punishment of the crime equally horrific? Or are we thinking that it is more cruel to punish a rapist with death but not at all horrific to kill the innocent life that came as a result? It can even be very easy to prove who the perpetrator was. All you need is a DNA match.
Bob Boyd writes:
"there is good reason to believe"
A phrase that captures so much of what passes for journalism today.
"there is good reason to believe" = "I have what I think is a good reason for wanting you to believe"
Tim writes:
Sorry, but rape in refugee camps is the cause, not resistance to abortion on demand in the US
I do not accept the causation effect she is claiming. The root cause is the rape occurring, in many cases by the supposed UN Peacekeepers themselves, in those hellholes they call refuge camps,not the resistance to abortion on demand that is growing in the United States.
She needs to check her confirmation bias. Maybe instead of crying about abortion limitations in the United States, where as far as I can tell pretty much NO ONE objects to aborting the child conceived as a result of rape (I wouldn't want the child aborted, as I do not believe in blood guilt, but I would not push that view onto the victim of rape either). As for the rapist, I am willing to hang them, publically and without the drop so they strangle slowly. But the babies are still innocent.
And the United States is in no way responsible for the refugee camps, unless we are going to advocate Pax Americana, and we are in no way qualified or competent to be the worlds policeman.
Jimmy_w writes: "Amplifying Tom T's comment. Famine is the same phenomenon as refugee rapes. We've known, since the '80s, that there is always enough food to feed everyone on Earth since the Green Revolution. Famine only happens if there is a Civil War, or if the governments deliberately want to starve a people. Same thing, refugee rapes only happen when there is a Civil War, or when governments will it so."
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