A Letter to the Ministry.

Printed in the Daily Prophet, an open letter to the Ministry.

Minister Fudge and associated personages.

How does it feel dear ministers to have blood on your hands? In your attempts to repopulate the Wizarding World, you have killed. Oh, I\'m not talking about the Dark Lord or any of the Death Eaters. I am talking about the young girls you have sentenced to a life of prostitution and slavery. By forcing these poor children to marry, they have become chattel to their \"husbands.\" They cannot divorce to escape the abuse that runs rampant through these forced marriages. They can barely go into hiding without being hauled back to their masters by the ministry and charged with kidnaping their own offspring. Even the Dark Lord himself would not have condoned such barbarity and yes, I would know.

These girls are forced to give up their education in favor of motherhood. There is no way they can attend several of their classes due to the risks to their pregnancies. After the child is born there is also the problem of adequate childcare for the newborn. It is near impossible for a new mother to continue her education with a babe on the teat. Educated witches raise educated children. Educated children become educated adults. Are you afriad of an educated populace and trying to control us generations into the future through ignorance?

By forcing girls barely old enough to menstruate to marry and provide offspring, you have murdered a generation. At the tender age of sixteen a witch\'s pelvis ot dot developed enough to pass the head of a babe through the birth canal any where near as often as it is for a witch over the age of twenty one. Do you know what happens when the head gets stuck? I can tell you very very simply so that you will be certain to understand. When the woman cannot pass the child out of the birth canal and into the world, they die. The baby dies from asphixiation. The woman dies from any number of things, not the least of which are hemoraging to death.

Oh yes, and you could not just leave it to chance just when these poor girls would bear their young. You had to drug the marriage challace. Oh there had to be a reason to have the Ministry overseeing the wedding rites of their victims, but even the most hardened of Death Eaters would not have foreseen that. You drugged your victims into consumating the marriage and in the process creating a new generation.

I analyzed the remains in our bloodstreams. I found some very damning things in our blood. A lust potion, about as potent as they come, was one of them. That little tidbit explained a lot to me as I have never been a pedoiphile and was quite sicked by the notion of just how young my bride was to be. The other thing that I found was a particularly dangerous fertility potion. The fertility potion did not even approach the lighter side of magic. We knew right then that my wife and many of her classmates were most likely already pregnant. Did wondwonder why we set up immediate pregnancy tests for all married students at Hogwarts after our wedding?

You remember what I said about carrying any children while so young being dangerous for the witch and the babe? The dangers go up exponentially with twins and other multiples. Every single witch married at Hogwarts has had at least twins. Would you care to explain it? Would you care to explain why it was necessary to execute muggleborn witches through the exotic method of pregnancy?

My wife did not do anything to deserve to die at the age of seventeen in childbirth. I have sextuplets to raise by myself without any sort of Ministerial aid, merely Ministerial causation. No sane person would subject a witch to that. Congratulations, you have murdered my wife and left me at widower at only thirty nine. I cannot afford a governess or a wet nurse. Lovely job Cornelius.

Sincerely,
Severus Snape