The Catholic Church wants to force an 11-year-old girl raped by a family member to give birth
The girl was impregnated after being repeatedly raped and suffering other sexual abuse by the father of her stepfather in the town of Yapacaní, in Bolivia’s eastern Santa Cruz region.
The case has thrown into sharp relief the gaping holes in the state’s protection for women and girls in Bolivia, which has one of highest levels of inter-familiar sexual violence and abuse in Latin America, and what some activists call a culture of rape.
The intervention of the Catholic church is also being severely questioned, after religious groups contacted the mother of the victim and persuaded her to oppose the termination of the pregnancy, a move which has prompted legal action by the Bolivian human rights ombudsman’s office.
“The girl didn’t even know what it meant to be pregnant; she told her cousin that she felt something moving inside her tummy. Her cousin told her mother – the girl’s aunt – who reported it to the police,” said Ana Paola García, the executive director of La Casa de la Mujer, a Bolivian women’s rights NGO.
the child’s mother, accompanied by a woman claiming to be a lawyer for the church, intervened, saying the girl had changed her mind, García said. The girl was removed from hospital and taken to a centre for adolescent mothers.
“There is evidently manipulation by the Catholic church which has practically kidnapped the girl and silenced the mother,” García said. “They are violating her human rights.”
“She is being obliged to continue with a pregnancy which puts her life at risk,” she added.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-devel...lic-church
The girl was impregnated after being repeatedly raped and suffering other sexual abuse by the father of her stepfather in the town of Yapacaní, in Bolivia’s eastern Santa Cruz region.
The case has thrown into sharp relief the gaping holes in the state’s protection for women and girls in Bolivia, which has one of highest levels of inter-familiar sexual violence and abuse in Latin America, and what some activists call a culture of rape.
The intervention of the Catholic church is also being severely questioned, after religious groups contacted the mother of the victim and persuaded her to oppose the termination of the pregnancy, a move which has prompted legal action by the Bolivian human rights ombudsman’s office.
“The girl didn’t even know what it meant to be pregnant; she told her cousin that she felt something moving inside her tummy. Her cousin told her mother – the girl’s aunt – who reported it to the police,” said Ana Paola García, the executive director of La Casa de la Mujer, a Bolivian women’s rights NGO.
the child’s mother, accompanied by a woman claiming to be a lawyer for the church, intervened, saying the girl had changed her mind, García said. The girl was removed from hospital and taken to a centre for adolescent mothers.
“There is evidently manipulation by the Catholic church which has practically kidnapped the girl and silenced the mother,” García said. “They are violating her human rights.”
“She is being obliged to continue with a pregnancy which puts her life at risk,” she added.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-devel...lic-church
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"