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Sudanese Ordered To Hang For Apostasy ‘Gives Birth In Jail’

Sudanese Ordered To Hang For Apostasy ‘Gives Birth In Jail’

Khartoum (AFP) – A Christian Sudanese woman, sentenced to hang for apostasy in a case that has sparked international outcry, has given birth in jail, her husband said Tuesday.

“Until now I did not see them. They didn’t allow me to go in and see,” Daniel Wani told AFP.

“I’m disappointed really,” he said from a prisons office where he was continuing efforts to see his wife and newborn daughter.

Meriam Yahia Ibrahim Ishag, 27, is being held at a women’s prison in Khartoum’s twin city of Omdurman.

Wani said he and his wife have not yet chosen a name for their baby.

Ishag already has a 20-month old son, who is also incarcerated with her, rights activists say.

A Khartoum-area court sentenced her to death on May 15.

Born to a Muslim father, she was convicted under the Islamic sharia law that has been in force in Sudan since 1983 and outlaws conversions on pain of death.

Wani said he is normally granted a weekly visit to the prison but had sought special permission to see his wife again after she gave birth.

Ishag was “frustrated” when he saw her on Monday, he said.

“We weren’t able to speak. There is a guard sitting there beside us,” said Wani, a Christian who says he was born in Khartoum.

“The mother and the baby seem to be doing okay,” a Western diplomat who is familiar with Ishag’s case told AFP.

But he said: “It’s a cruel treatment to be in such a situation.”

Giving birth in a jail “is certainly not the best place, for physical and psychological reasons,” the diplomat said.

“We gave you three days to recant but you insist on not returning to Islam. I sentence you to be hanged,” Judge Abbas Mohammed al-Khalifa said as he passed the verdict against Ishag, addressing her by her father’s Muslim name, Adraf al-Hadi Mohammed Abdullah.

Khalifa also sentenced her to 100 lashes for “adultery.” Under Sudan’s interpretation of sharia, a Muslim woman cannot marry a non-Muslim man and any such relationship is regarded as adulterous.

“I am a Christian and I never committed apostasy,” Ishag calmly told the judge before he passed sentence.

London-based Amnesty International said Ishag was raised as an Orthodox Christian, her mother’s religion, because her Muslim father was absent.

The Western diplomat said of her case: “For the image of Sudan, it’s certainly no good.”

Britain and Canada last week summoned the Sudanese envoys to their countries over Ishag’s case, which they say conflicts with Sudan’s international human rights obligations.

United Nations rights experts have called the conviction “outrageous” and said it must be overturned.

“Choosing and/or changing one’s religion is not a crime at all. On the contrary, it is a basic human right,” they said after the verdict.

Britain denounced the court’s decision as “barbaric,” while the United States said it was “deeply disturbed” and Canada said it was “shocked and appalled.”

The Citizen newspaper, in an earlier editorial, said members of Ishag’s family filed the court case “for other hidden purposes.”

Wani declined to comment on what was behind the legal action against his wife.

He said an appeal has already been filed.

The woman would be allowed to nurse her baby for two years after the birth, before any death sentence is carried out, legal experts have said.

If she is hanged, Ishag will be the first person executed for apostasy under the 1991 penal code, said Christian Solidarity Worldwide, a British-based group working for religious freedom.

Information Minister Ahmed Bilal Osman has said Sudan is not unique in its law against apostasy.

“In Saudi Arabia, in all the Muslim countries, it is not allowed at all for a Muslim to change his religion,” he said.

©afp.com / Ashraf Shazly

For Many Teens, Formal Sex Education Comes Too Late, CDC Report Says

For Many Teens, Formal Sex Education Comes Too Late, CDC Report Says

By Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — Health experts have some simple advice for reducing the teen birthrate in the U.S. — make sure teens learn about abstinence and birth control before they start having sex.

It sounds obvious, but it’s obviously needed, according to a report released Tuesday by researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Among teen girls who were sexually experienced, 83 percent told interviewers that they didn’t get formal sex education until after they’d lost their virginity.

Altogether, 91 percent of young women between the ages of 15 and 17 said they’d taken a formal sex education class that covered information about birth control or ways to say no to sex (and 61 percent said they’d learned about both). In addition, 76 percent of girls in this age group discussed one or both of these topics with their parents.

But timing is everything. The fact that most sexually active young women didn’t get clued in about abstinence or birth control until after they’d had sex “represents a missed opportunity to introduce medically accurate information,” the researchers wrote.

The study, published online in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, noted that:

—14.6 percent of 15-year-olds had ever had sex, including 8 percent who were sexually active in the previous three months;

—28.5 percent of 16-year-olds had ever had sex, including 16.5 percent who were sexually active in the previous three months; and

—38.6 percent of 17-year-olds had ever had sex, including 29.7 percent who were sexually active in the previous three months.

Only 15 percent of these teens used a birth control method that was deemed at least “moderately” effective the first time they had sex, including the pill, vaginal ring, IUD or hormonal implant. Another 62 percent used a “less effective” method, such as condoms, sponges, the rhythm method or withdrawal. The remaining 23 percent said they didn’t use any type of contraception when they lost their virginity, the researchers reported.

Overall, the teen birthrate continued to decline, according to data from the CDC’s National Vital Statistics System. In 2012, the birthrate hit an all-time low of 29.4 per 1,000 women between 15 and 19. (In 1991, there were 84.1 births for every 1,000 women in that age group.)

The birthrate declined even more among the subset of teens who are not yet legal adults. For every 1,000 15-year-olds, 5.4 babies were born in 2012 (down from 17.9 in 1991). Among 16-year-olds, the birthrate was 12.9 in 2012 (down from 36.9 in 1991), and for 17-year-olds it was 23.7 in 2012 (down from 60.6 in 1991).

Birthrates among these younger teens varied significantly by state and by race and ethnic group, the CDC researchers found. The District of Columbia had the highest rate, at 29 births per 1,000 women 15 to 17. At the other end of the spectrum was New Hampshire, with 6.2 births per 1,000.

Nationwide, Latina teens had the highest birthrate, at 25.5 births per 1,000 women 15 to 17. Asian-American teens had the lowest birthrate in this age group, at 4.1. In the middle were whites (8.4), Native Americans (17) and African-Americans (21.9), according to the report.

The study did not include data on births to girls under 15. It also excluded information on miscarriages, abortions and stillbirths, since recent figures for those were not available.

Public health experts are especially concerned about births to younger teens because these mothers “are at greatest risk for poor medical, social, and economic outcomes,” the researchers noted. Among other challenges, new mothers in this age group are significantly less likely to finish high school than teens who gave birth at age 18 or 19.

About one in four teen births is to a young woman between 15 and 17, according to the CDC. Every week, nearly 1,700 babies are born to mothers in this age group.

 Shameless Magazine via Flickr.com birth control

Autism ‘Patchwork’ Begins During Pregnancy

Autism ‘Patchwork’ Begins During Pregnancy

By Kerry Sheridan

Washington (AFP) — The brains of children with autism contain a built-in patchwork of defects, suggesting that the developmental disorder begins while they are growing in the womb, said a U.S. study.

Researchers described their findings in the New England Journal of Medicine as “direct evidence” of a prenatal origin for autism, which affects as many as one in 88 children in the United States and has no known cure.

“Building a baby’s brain during pregnancy involves creating a cortex that contains six layers,” said co-author Eric Courchesne, professor of neurosciences and director of the Autism Center of Excellence at University of California, San Diego.

“We discovered focal patches of disrupted development of these cortical layers in the majority of children with autism.”

For the study, researchers dissected brain tissue from 11 children, aged two to 15, who had been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and who had died, most of them by drowning.

Looking for a specific set of 25 genes that had “robust, consistent, and specific expression patterns in the cortex,” they compared them to brain samples from 11 children without autism, said the study.

Researchers found that 91 percent of the autistic brains were lacking — or showed an unusual pattern — of the expected genetic markers in several layers of the cortex.

The signs of disorganization were found in patches across the different layers of the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain, the parts that are responsible for social function, communication, emotions, and language.

“The most surprising finding was the similar early developmental pathology across nearly all of the autistic brains, especially given the diversity of symptoms in patients with autism, as well as the extremely complex genetics behind the disorder,” said co-author Ed Lein of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle.

Researchers said they still don’t understand why these changes come about in some children, apparently leading to autism, but not in others.

The patchwork nature of the defects does, however, provide a clue as to why autism can affect people in various degrees, from severe to mild disabilities.

It also may explain why some children respond to intensive therapy and become better communicators when identified early, since the brain may be able to rewire some connections to overcome the areas that are not working.

“While autism is generally considered a developmental brain disorder, research has not identified a consistent or causative lesion,” said Thomas Insel, director of National Institute for Mental Health, which funded the study.

“If this new report of disorganized architecture in the brains of some children with autism is replicated, we can presume this reflects a process occurring long before birth.”

The same research team had previously found that the brains of children with autism were heavier than other children’s, and that they had more neurons in the prefrontal cortex.

The brains sampled for this study “represented nearly the entirety of tissue suitable for study at the Brain and Tissue Bank for Developmental Disorders at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center,” said the article.

Still, the fact that only 11 were studied means that more research is necessary, said Andrew Adesman, chief of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at Steven & Alexandra Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York.

“This study would have been stronger if they had a larger sample and included a group of children who had neurologic deficits but not autism,” said Adesman, who was not involved with the research.

He nevertheless described the team’s techniques for identifying microscopic brain abnormalities as “extremely sophisticated.”

While some of the physical brain changes in autism were already known to science, the latest research provides a more detailed look at how this happens.

“This study is particularly important as it points to the potential role of several genes involved in the specification of distinct cortical layers during early brain development,” said Patrick Hof, vice-chair of the Fishberg Department of Neuroscience, Friedman Brain Institute, and Seaver Autism Center at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Research like this “can provide us with crucial clues to develop novel therapeutic strategies toward a cure,” he said.

©afp.com/Jean-Philippe Ksiazek