UNFPA: Birth control for girl sex slaves?

By Wendy Wright | March 17, 2016

Just days after NYT reported ISIS is using modern contraceptives to turn young women into sex slaves, UNFPA’s chief tweeted  “All need reproductive services to help them avoid early and make a healthy transition into adulthood.”

Babatunde Osotimehin’s tweet was sent during the annual UN Commission on the Status of Women. The New York Times’ article had run just 4 days before titled “To Maintain Supply of Sex Slaves, ISIS Pushes Birth Control: Modern Methods allow the Islamic State to keep up its systemic rape of captives under medieval codes.”

It reports:

Soon after buying her, the fighter brought the teenage girl a round box containing four strips of pills, one of them colored red.

“Every day, I had to swallow one in front of him. He gave me one box per month. When I ran out, he replaced it. When I was sold from one man to another, the box of pills came with me,” explained the girl, who learned only months later that she was being given birth control.

It is a particularly modern solution to a medieval injunction: According to an obscure ruling in Islamic law cited by the Islamic State, a man must ensure that the woman he enslaves is free of child before having intercourse with her.

One girl described how:
she 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.

“To make sure you don’t get pregnant,” she recalled him saying.

When he had finished, he pushed her back onto the bed and raped her for the first time.

The practice came to light when a doctor noticed that of the hundreds of women rape victims rescued from ISIS, relatively few were pregnant.
The NYT interviewed three dozen women and found “numerous methods the fighters used to avoid pregnancy, including oral and injectable contraception, and sometimes both. In at least one case, a woman was forced to have an abortion in order to make her available for sex, and others were pressured to do so.”
This prompted Julia Duin, a religion reporter, to wonder about a missing piece in the NYT article:
And here’s a question for journalists to investigate. Since ISIS seems to have reams of birth control pills, Depo-Provera and other contraceptives on hand, one wonders where they’re coming from. Who is exporting them into ISIS territory? Yes, that’s another this story does not solve.
A question for UNFPA and Planned Parenthood and all the others demanding “all girls need reproductive health services to avoid early pregnancy and make a healthy transition into adulthood.”
Are they supplying ‘reproductive health services’ to assist rapists and traffickers to sexually abuse girls?
And shouldn’t all girls be free to be children, unencumbered by the extremely adult act and consequences of sex?
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