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Women in Syria Need More Than Guided Missiles
The cut and dried numbers behind this crisis mask the tragedy taking place every day: two million Syrians have already crossed over into Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Turkey. (So many refugees have fled to tiny Lebanon that the population has effectively increased by 25 percent.) In addition, there are four million people displaced within Syria. At this rate, the aid organization CARE predicts that half of Syria's 22 million citizens will be displaced or in need of assistance by the end of the year.
Three-quarters of the displaced people in and around Syria are women and children, many of whom will be sexually assaulted during the conflict. While there are no firm figures from Syria yet, human rights organizations and refugee agencies have been documenting cases of sexual assault for months. Cases like that of one family, now in Amman, in which three women -- two sisters and their brother's wife -- were raped in front of their brother and father. A psychologist who has been treating the family for post-traumatic stress disorder believes that the brother's wife became pregnant as a result, but because of the shame surrounding rape, neither she nor her husband will acknowledge it.
Women who become pregnant as a result of rape have few options in this part of the world. International human rights agreements have called on nations to decriminalize abortion, but abortion laws in the countries receiving Syrian refugees are very strict, allowing abortion only to save a woman's life (except Turkey, which has much broader exceptions). Strict laws don't mean that abortions don't occur, however. Data from the World Health Organization and the Guttmacher Institute show that hundreds of thousands of women from the region undergo unsafe abortions every year, putting women's life and health at risk.
Dismissing these restrictive laws as a product of these countries' supposedly conservative Muslim cultures would be simplistic. U.S. law restricts the use of our humanitarian assistance from providing abortion care, even if women have been raped. Under the 1973 Helms Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act, U.S. funds may not be used to provide abortion as a method of family planning. For women and girls who have been raped in war, is abortion really a means of family planning?
Three-quarters of the displaced people in and around Syria are women and children, many of whom will be sexually assaulted during the conflict. While there are no firm figures from Syria yet, human rights organizations and refugee agencies have been documenting cases of sexual assault for months. Cases like that of one family, now in Amman, in which three women -- two sisters and their brother's wife -- were raped in front of their brother and father. A psychologist who has been treating the family for post-traumatic stress disorder believes that the brother's wife became pregnant as a result, but because of the shame surrounding rape, neither she nor her husband will acknowledge it.
Women who become pregnant as a result of rape have few options in this part of the world. International human rights agreements have called on nations to decriminalize abortion, but abortion laws in the countries receiving Syrian refugees are very strict, allowing abortion only to save a woman's life (except Turkey, which has much broader exceptions). Strict laws don't mean that abortions don't occur, however. Data from the World Health Organization and the Guttmacher Institute show that hundreds of thousands of women from the region undergo unsafe abortions every year, putting women's life and health at risk.
Dismissing these restrictive laws as a product of these countries' supposedly conservative Muslim cultures would be simplistic. U.S. law restricts the use of our humanitarian assistance from providing abortion care, even if women have been raped. Under the 1973 Helms Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act, U.S. funds may not be used to provide abortion as a method of family planning. For women and girls who have been raped in war, is abortion really a means of family planning?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anu-kumar/women-in-syria-need-more-_b_3922160.html