The FINANCIAL — A 12-year-old Yemeni girl, who was forced into marriage, died during a painful childbirth that also killed her baby, a children's rights group said on September 14. Fawziya Abdullah Youssef, who has been married off the year before by her father to a 24-year-old farmer, died due to extreme blood loss.
Fawziya Ammodi struggled for three days in labor, before dying of severe bleeding at a hospital on Friday, said the Seyaj Organization for the Protection of Children, CNN reported."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.
Born into an impoverished family in Hodeidah, Fawziya was forced to drop out of school and married off to a 24-year-old man last year, al-Qureshi said, according to the same source.
The Yemeni Organisation for Childhood Protection (Seyaj) said its volunteers had confirmed that doctors had been unable to save Fawziya's life after she suffered complications from the delivery, as AFP gives information.
"The case of Fawziya illustrates the tragedy of those whom we call 'the brides of death', who are little girls, less than 15 years old, forced into marriage, mostly due to financial reasons," Ahmed al-Qorashi told AFP.
"The proportion of little girls and teenage females married before 15 is nearly 50 percent" in rural parts of Yemen, one of the world's poorest countries despite its proximity to oil-rich Saudi Arabia, the same source reported. "These marriages are the result of poverty, ignorance and illiteracy, and lead to the destruction of the lives of these young girls, whose opinion is not taken in consideration," Qorashi added.
The issue of Yemeni child brides came to the forefront in 2008 with 10-year-old Nujood Ali.
She was pulled out of school and married to a man who beat and raped her within weeks of the ceremony, according to CNN. To escape, Nujood hailed a taxi — the first time in her life — to get across town to the central courthouse where she sat on a bench and demanded to see a judge. After a well-publicized trial, she was granted a divorce.
The case of Nojood Mohammed Ali shed light on the suffering of the many adolescent girls forced into marriage, as AFP informed. "This is a real tragedy in which the government is the top responsible party, because the president (Ali Abdullah Saleh) has until now not promulgated the law (on a minimum age for marriage) adopted by parliament in February," said the lawyer who obtained Nojud's divorce, Shaza Nasser.
She said the government "should launch awareness campaigns in rural areas and prevent clerics from concluding marriage contracts" for girls under the age of 17, the same source gives information. She said authorities also had the duty to make sure girls received schooling in a country where illiteracy rates are estimated at 33.4 percent among men and reach 76 percent among women.
According to Sky News, the country's parliament passed a law in February which set the minimum age for marriage at 17 but it was sent back to a constitutional committee for review after some MPs described it as "un-Islamic".
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