Hurriyet Daily News reports that Albayrak had been hired to photograph the July 5th wedding at Turgut Özal Nature Park in the eastern Turkish province of Malatya. On the day of, when he noticed that the bride-to-be didn’t look like an adult, he asked the groom her age and learned that she was only 15.
“The groom had come to my studio some two weeks ago and was alone,” Albayrak tells the Daily News. “I saw the bride for the first time at the wedding. She’s a child, and I felt her fear because she was trembling.”
Albayrak then reportedly refused to continue as the wedding photographer and attempted to stop the wedding.
The argument soon turned physical when the groom attacked him as he was attempting to leave, Albayrak says. The photographer ended up breaking the client’s nose in the fight, according to local reports.
Albayrak confirmed the reports in a Facebook post, which has been met with widespread approval, attracting thousands of Likes and hundreds of overwhelmingly positive comments.
“I wish this had never happened, but it did,” Albayrak writes. “And if you were to ask me if I’d do the same thing again, I’d say ‘yes.’ Child brides are [victims] of child abuse and no power on earth can make me photograph a child in a wedding gown.”
The legal minimum age for marriage in Turkey is 18-years-old for both sexes, and child marriage is punishable by imprisonment for men who marry underage girls. Despite being outlawed, however, child marriage is still prevalent in the country and remains a controversial political issue.
btw - let’s remind ourselves, americans, that unlike turkey, in the US the legal minimum age for marriage is only 18 in two states. in alabama, you can be married as young as fourteen years old if you have “parental permission”. in california, you can get married under 18 if you go to counseling, have a parent with you when you apply for the marriage license, and appear before a judge. in some states, there isn’t even a specific minimum age for marriage.
the minimum marriage age for girls in new hampshire is 13 years old.
child marriage is not an “over there” problem, it happens right here, legally. any one of us might find ourselves called upon to break somebody’s nose if we encounter something like this occurring. we also have a responsibility to support groups and laws trying to end child marriage in this country.
Florida judges have approved child marriages of children down to age 11.
And yet stories describing just this — a system that does encourage the
vulnerable to seek medical death — are coming fast and hard lately. A number of recentnewsarticles
have reported on Canadians who, driven by poverty and a lack of access
to adequate health care, housing, and social services, have turned to
the country’s euthanasia system. In multiple cases, veterans requesting help from Veterans Affairs Canada — at least one asked for PTSD treatment, another for a ramp for her wheelchair — were asked by case workers if they would like to apply for euthanasia.
[…]
As this article will show, in internal meetings, those close to the
system have long talked openly about red flags that many people are
choosing euthanasia because they’re not getting the “supports and
cares” they need. The physicians in charge of the process not only know
that this is happening, but they have discussed it in seminars,
collected evidence, and then kept it quiet in public.
The safeguards promised by Trudeau and others to prevent vulnerable
people from heading down the road to euthanasia turn out to be vague,
pro forma, and easy to get around by doctor-shopping. And interviews
with patients and their loved ones show that some of them, perhaps many,
are making it to the end.
One of the greatest reasons for concern is the sheer scale of Canada’s
euthanasia regime. California provides a useful point of comparison: It
legalized medically assisted death the same year as Canada, 2016, and it
has about the same population, just under forty million. In 2021 in
California, 486 people died using the state’s assisted suicide program.
In Canada in the same year, 10,064 people used MAID to die.
[…]
In fact, the evidence of abuse is there if advocates want to find it.
The Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers, the leading
organization of Canadian euthanasia providers, has sat on credible
evidence by its own members that people are being driven to euthanasia
by credit card debt, poor housing, and difficulties getting medical
care. These are people who do have some sort of medical condition but in
many cases are using them to check a box in the approval process, when
the relief they are mainly seeking is from other forms of suffering. And
the system is doing much more to help them down the path toward death
than to protect them as the public was promised.
[…]
Justin Trudeau made a clear promise to the public: that nobody would
receive MAID “because you’re not getting the supports and cares that you
actually need.” But the CAMAP recordings plainly suggest that exactly
this is happening, that euthanasia workers know it, and that they are
acting with no urgency to stop it.
During the Q&A, no one in the seminar doubts that the stories are
true. Nobody suggests strengthening the safeguards, alerting the
public, or halting the system while the problem is worked out. Less than
a decade into Canada’s experiment in medicalized death, with over
31,500 people dead, the speakers feebly propose to start collecting
data.
The presenters clearly understand that what they are describing is a
terrible moral problem. “Our silence is our complicity,” Gibb-Carsley
writes on her last slide in a large font. But Gibb-Carsley and Kevin
Reel do not present euthanasia driven by poverty as a problem for MAID.
Actually, they suggest, it presents an opportunity to highlight the real problem: the inadequacy of the welfare state.
It’s as if the situation offers a silver lining. Reel excitedly talks
about the problem as an “extraordinary lever” to lobby for improved
welfare. Gibb-Carsley’s slideshow concludes, “trust in the evolution of
this field of practice,” meaning the practice of euthanasia. “Your
Assessments provide a rare opportunity to hear from the typically
disenfranchised patients about their experiences.” The subtext of this
sunny euphemism is that giving a voice to the voiceless will, for many,
ultimately mean killing them.
[…]
According to an internal study of MAID assessments, presented to CAMAP
in 2022, of 54 patients who were not terminally ill, two-thirds had
concurrent mental illness. A fifth of the patients had difficulty
finding “appropriate” treatment. And, most disturbingly, over a third of
patients were “not offered appropriate / available treatments.”
[…]
From Rosina, Les, Mary, Nancy, Greg, Lucy, and so many others across
Canada, what we hear are the cries of people in despair asking for help.
Just a few years ago they would have been textbook candidates for what a
just society would say: Your life has value. In Canada today they hear something else: Your death will be beautiful.
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