Ugh!
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of S. Kashdan
Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2016 10:40 AM
To: Blind Democracy List
Subject: [blind-democracy] Better copy: Yazidi Women Seized by the Islamic
State Caught Between Rock and a Hard Place
Yazidi Women Seized by the Islamic State Caught Between Rock and a Hard
Place
By Russ Wellen
Foreign Policy In Focus, March 15, 2016
http://fpif.org/yazidi-women-seized-islamic-state-caught-rock-hard-place/
Few Yazidi women captured by the Islamic State have become pregnant. (Photo:
Atheist Alliance)
Yazidi women in Iraq who were captured by the Islamic State in 2014 and
since used as sex slaves have been experiencing few pregnancies. Writes
Rukmini Callimachi in the New York Times:
... of more than 700 rape victims from the Yazidi ethnic group who have
sought treatment so far at a United Nations-backed clinic in northern Iraq,
just 5 percent became pregnant during their enslavement.
Despite their medieval attitudes about sex, birth control, and abortion, the
fighters who "own" and sell them have been giving them birth control pills.
Why?
To keep the sex trade running, the fighters have aggressively pushed birth
control on their victims so they can continue the abuse unabated while the
women are passed among them.
In other words, to sell women they can't be pregnant. Lest you think it's
due to some misplaced sense of honor, Callimachi dispels us of that notion.
"The purpose of this is to guarantee there is no confusion over a child's
paternity." Talk about debasing the concept of thank goodness for small
favors: In return for being spared having the babies of Islamic State
fighters, the women are raped on an ongoing basis.
The fighters--let's just call them what they are: rapists--acquainted
themselves with gynecology. A teenage Yazidi girl interviewed by Callimachi
was sold a total of seven times.
When prospective buyers came to inquire about her, she overheard them asking
for assurances that she was not pregnant, and her owner provided the box of
birth control as proof. That was not enough for the third man who bought
her, she said. He quizzed her on the date of her last menstrual cycle and,
unnerved by what he perceived as a delay, gave her a version of the
so-called morning-after pill, causing her to start bleeding.
Even then, he seemed unsatisfied.
Finally he came into her room, closed the door and ordered her to lower her
pants. The teenager feared she was about to be raped. Instead he pulled out
a syringe and gave her a shot on her upper thigh. It was a 150-milligram
dose of Depo-Provera, an injectable contraceptive, a box of which she showed
to a reporter.
Some responsibility for the rape of the Yazidi women must be laid at the
feet of the United States, which destabilized (to put it mildly) the region
and laid the groundwork for the formation of the Islamic State. But it's
also a testament to how easily religious doctrine can be twisted to the
needs of a group.
