Faith Groups Are Trying To Block Emergency Contraception For Raped Migrant Children

[sheshe2]

A 14-year-old Guatemalan migrant is left stranded in a wooded area in Mexico after the freight train she was traveling on had a minor derailment.

CREDIT: Rebecca Blackwell/ AP

Estimates suggest that anywhere between 60 and 80 percent of migrant women and girls are raped on their journey as they travel across the southern United States border. But many of the organizations that provide medical care to these migrants are refusing to provide emergency contraception or make pregnancy-related referrals to girls who have been raped. What’s more, the religious organizations that operate these groups are opposing a move by the Obama administration to address epidemic rape of young unaccompanied migrants by requiring contraceptive care.

During last year’s border surge, a total of 68,541 unaccompanied children streamed through the southern Texas border from Latin America. Almost half of the children apprehended by border patrol agents were girls. Rape and sexual assault are “major motivating factors” for why girls flee their home countries of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, a Women’s Refugee Commission report found last October. The report stated that children on the run who traveled with smuggling guides known as coyotes reported sexual abuse, including one child who “told of how women and girls were kept in a separate room and could be heard screaming while being raped.” And even once in the United States, some migrants alleged that sexual assault (especially among LGBT detainees) took place in detention, sometimes by guards.

Those children may not receive adequate care after border patrol agents pass them onto group shelter homes, the majority of which are operated by faith-based organizations such as the Baptist Child and Family Services (BCFS), which received $190 million in a single grant last year. But it was the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), which received roughly $22.1 million, that sent a letter last week objecting to a Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) regulation by the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) that would require federally funded organizations that house unaccompanied migrant children to provide victims of sexual abuse with “unimpeded access to emergency medical treatment, crisis intervention services, emergency contraception, and sexually transmitted infections prophylaxis, in accordance with professionally accepted standards of care, where appropriate under medical or mental health professional standards.”

The rule includes a clause that would allow faith-based organizations to offer external pregnancy-related referrals for unaccompanied children. Grantees that house unaccompanied children could deny services “on religious or moral grounds,” needing only to coordinate with federal staff members who would provide the services. But a letter submitted last week even objected to a referral requirement that would “impose a duty on the conscientious objector to refer for the very item or procedure to which it has a religious or moral objection.” What’s more, the letter co-signers want the ORR to free up organizations “from any requirement to provide, facilitate the provision of, provide information about, or refer or arrange for items or procedures to which they have a religious or moral objection.”

Read More http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2015/03/05/3627571/faith-refugee-contraception/

These "Charities" need to have the money taken away from them. I am sick to death of hearing about their religious or moral high ground, when they are suppose to be helping these children!

[niyad]

1. I didn't think I could be any sicker than I already am reading the horrors posted here today.

seems I was wrong.

these people are just hate-filled, self-righteous zealots with not one atom of humanity to them.

[atreides1]

2. What's the difference...

...between Christianity and Satanism?

Christianity does not believe in freedom and has been responsible for millions of deaths throughout the history of mankind...Satanism, not so much!

[niyad]

4. you have that correct

[cbayer]

6. How A Broad Faith-Based Movement Is Coming Together To Aid Unaccompanied Children On The Border

http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2014/07/11/3459112/faith-groups-unaccompanied-children/

It's really important to be able to distinguish those doing harm from those doing good and not paint with such a broad brush.

[sheshe2]

3. "self-righteous zealots with not one atom of humanity to them."

You called it all right, niyad. They make me physically ill.

[MANative]

5. If this is "Faith" then I want nothing to do with it. These bastards don't...

deserve the very breath in their bodies.

[azmom]

7. A long time ago a good friend of our family

Wanted to cross the border illegally to take a job babysitting my niece. She had the money and begged my sister for the job. My father was very afraid of what the coyotes woud do to her so he crossed the desert with her. He said the trip was hell. That girl is now married and has kids of her own. My father has passed away, but I'm proud of how he protected that girl.