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Yemeni child bride dies while giving birth
[Al Arabiya Latest] A 12-year-old Yemeni girl, who was forced into marriage, has died during a difficult delivery in which her baby also died, a children's rights organization said on Sunday.

"The child, Fawziya Abdullah Youssef, died on Friday Sept. 11 in western Yemen at the age of 12 due to a complicated delivery," the Yemeni Organization for Childhood Protection (Seyaj) said.

" The lack of a statutory minimum age for marriage makes it impossible for local officials to ban child marriages, especially among girls, or to punish their parents or spouses for the disastrous consequences of such marriages "
Seyaj
The organization said its volunteers had confirmed that doctors had been unable to save Fawziya's life when she began to bleed severely after struggling to give birth for three days.

Raised in an impoverished family with a father suffering from kidney failure, Fawziya was forced to drop out of school and married off to a 24-year-old man at the age of 11. She got pregnant a year later, the group said.

"The lack of a statutory minimum age for marriage makes it impossible for local officials to ban child marriages, especially among girls, or to punish their parents or spouses for the disastrous consequences of such marriages," Seyaj said, adding that such marriages are widespread on Yemen's Red Sea coast.

Last year, a Yemeni court granted a divorce to an eight-year-old girl whose unemployed father forced her into an arranged marriage with a man 20 years her senior, saying he feared she might otherwise be kidnapped by the would-be spouse.
Posted by: Fred 2009-09-14
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=278887