• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Enhancing Girlhood

Thoughts of a girl focused scholar practitioner

  • Home
  • About
  • My Services
  • Blog
  • Contact

Ashley Lackovich-Van Gorp / January 25, 2016

Greetings from the #ICFP!

So here I am in Nusa Dua, Indonesia after the opening session of the 4th International Conference on Family Planning. I’m still spinning from UNFPA Executive Director Babatunde Osotimehin’s opening remarks: he spoke of the family planning needs of married girls.

This remark is monumental. Married girls are among the most marginalized and invisible groups of human beings. Child marriage negatively impacts every aspect of a girl’s life, and when she marries she loses control over her own body. Her husband not only controls her access to family planning, but he often denies her the ability to refuse sex. Forced sex is common, and all sex is rape because she is a child. Child marriage often leads to early first pregnancy, and together pregnancy and child birth remain the leading cause of death for very young adolescents in the Global South.

What does this mean? This means that delaying child marriage is family planning. This also means that we must figure out how to get past the power structures in a girl child’s marriage to provide her with access to all of her human rights, including family planning. I look forward to presenting on this topic here at the ICFP on Wednesday.

I’m happy to be in Indonesia this week, and even happier to known that married girls are on the global agenda. Thanks for remembering child brides today, Executive Director Osotimehin.

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: ICFP2016 Tagged With: adolescent girls, child brides, child marriage, ICFP

Primary Sidebar

Recent Posts

  • Voices for Girls’ Education: Reaching All Girls With Education
  • ISIS dissolves- but what happens to the women and girls?
  • Standing Up for Girls in the Time of Trump
  • For their Dignity & our Humanity
  • Curious about what I do in the DR Congo?

Footer

Resource Sites

Girls Globe
Enhance Worldwide
RAINN
The Population Council’s Girl Center
YWCA
Girl Up

Contact

Email: enhancinggirlhood@yahoo.com
Phone: (937) 708-0144

Copyright © 2025 · Enhancing Girlhood · Built and Hosted by: Listen to the Wind Media