First things first: forced marriages of young girls remains a repugnant reality in many nations across our planet. But as members and defenders of civilization, we assert that a 13-year-old girl cannot even consent to have sex, and just as she cannot be a sexual partner, she also cannot be a wife and mother -- she ought to be a girl, and she also ought to be a student who gets to decide what she wants to be and go to school so she can become what she wants to be. These values maximize freedom for our children, but in Burkina Faso, at least one in three girls still get married before the age of 18, even though that's now against the law there. (Burkina Faso doesn't automatically confer citizenship upon birth, but does confer citizenship upon marriage, and I presume this has a good deal to do with girls getting married young there.) Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Burkina Faso to enforce its laws and ensure that families do not force girls into early marriages.
Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 3706/S. 1911, the Reach Every Mother and Child Act of 2015, then RESULTS still helps you do that. H.R. 3706/S. 1911 would direct our government to plan foreign aid in order to end preventable child deaths (including deaths during childbirth and shortly thereafter) in two decades. Sound ambitious? It shouldn't -- if we can now fit a thousand long-playing albums on a device the size of a deck of cards, we should easily be able to ensure that every child on the planet has a chance at a good life, one in which they can fulfill their will and contribute to the greater good. The world has halved preventable child deaths just in the last 25 years (against the tide of worldwide monetarist cruelty, no less!), but not every country on Earth has access to clean water or health care like we do, and they could use, and deserve, our help. No, I'm not kowtowing to the media-whipped fever pitch against foreigners that seems so popular these days. People are people, and helping them fight preventable child death will reduce terrorism.
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