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I stood there while the doctors tried to reason, the family argued, and the young woman just lay there silently, letting a bunch of strangers and her in-laws decide what her life would be after that.
“We’ll do anything but not do the operation,” the husband said firmly.
The woman on the bed winced in severe pain, and looked at him with wide helpless eyes.
“Why?” I asked him. “It’s a tumour. It could be cancer and it could kill her if not removed.”
“Because if we remove the uterus, she can never have a child.” The husband frowned at me as if it was the most natural thing to understand.
I stood there dumbfounded, helpless.
As a nurse I’ve had many different kinds of experiences, but this one was particularly weird.
A husband ‘choosing’ a lifetime of pain and possible risk of death for his wife, because he’s the ‘legal guardian’ — and why? Just so they could preserve her uterus to have a child, when we knew it was impossible, not with the big tumour. It was sick, sadistic, and pure evil.
To see that husbands and in-laws can have so much say in a woman’s life after marriage, it kills me to see that woman on the bed suffer. As a nurse, however, my hands are tied. It’s her decision, her consent, and no amount of support will help, if she was letting her husband decide.
I’d never know why she was doing it — if it was a choice or fear and oppression but that look on her face wasn’t natural.
I stood there while the doctors tried to reason, the family argued, and the young woman just lay there silently, letting a bunch of strangers and her in-laws decide what her life would be after that. There was a kind of helplessness about the entire situation, and we all nurses wanted to help so badly, but we didn’t know how.
There must be laws in place to safeguard women’s rights. There are voices that speak out, but for poor women from the remotest villages in Bihar, there really isn’t much choice, is there? It’s easy to say ‘fight out of the system’. For the ones who have no voice, is it really so easy?
Why is having a biological child so important for a woman to be defined as a ‘woman’, and for her to be accepted by the family and the society? It’s 2022.
Isn’t it time we change this?
Image source: Still from Short Film CONSENT/Movifi, YouTube
Writer by night and nurse by day I'm quiet by nature, shy they say I wear my scrubs as if they were a cape But once I start speaking, there's no escape. #nurse # read more...
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