U.S. blocks aid for rape victims

PAKISTAN

Imaan Zainab Mazari-Hazir

The News International

The Trump administration has made an “open declaration of hostility toward women worldwide,” said Imaan Zainab Mazari-Hazir. During what should have been a routine approval last week of a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning sexual violence in wartime, the American delegation insisted that all references to protecting women’s “sexual and reproductive health” be removed. The U.S. said it would veto the resolution if there were any whiff of the idea that a woman raped during war might be allowed to get an abortion. France’s U.N. ambassador, François Delattre, called the U.S.’s interference “intolerable and incomprehensible,” saying women should not be forced to bear their rapists’ children, and he is right. A married woman who bears such a child can be rejected by her husband; an unmarried one can face social ostracization. Such women are doubly victimized, “their lives forever altered with no hope of support from society at large.” And the scale of the problem worldwide is staggering. It’s not just state armies that prey upon women in conflict zones—U.N. peacekeepers also commit sexual abuse. In Cambodia alone, nearly 25,000 babies “were fathered and abandoned by peacekeepers.” Thanks to America’s puritanical insistence, the U.N. will be able to do little to help women “subjected to the most intrusive violations of their bodily integrity.”

■