On Religious Misogyny
Does God Hate Women? Chapter 1, pp: 19-24
Generations of women had sacrificed their feelings to preserve the work of God
Carolyn Jessop was born into the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a Mormon offshoot that still practices polygamy, or as they call it, ‘plural marriage.’ Her grandmother taught her she had been blessed ‘to come into a family where generations of women had sacrificed their feelings to preserve the work of God.’ Her only purpose was to have as many children as possible. This did not explain why her mother beat her so often or why so many of the women wore dark glasses to hide their black eyes, but it did give her a feeling of having been singled out for something important.
Jessop was eighteen when her father announced that God had picked a husband for her: Merril Jessop, a 50-year-old man with weathered skin and yellow teeth. She had never met him, but she knew he already had three wives and several dozen children. She had gone to school with some of his daughters. She had heard bad things about the way Merril treated his family. Boys who worked for his construction company said he didn't pay them and he worked them like dogs.
She adored her father, and her church had taught her ‘to honour our mothers and our father,’ but she was outraged. Her father however explained that when a directive like this came down from the Prophet, it was essential not to waste time.
I could barely breathe - then Dad said the wedding would take place in two days' time. My life had been swiped out from under me.
I later discovered that Merril had married into my family only to stop my father suing him over a business deal that had gone sour. More humiliating still, he hadn't meant to marry me, but my younger and prettier sister, Annette. When he asked the Prophet to arrange the marriage, Merril got our names mixed up. [1]
Afghanistan, Arizona – they’re not as different as one might expect. Caroline Jessop was allowed to stay in school longer than Shabana, but she was handed over to a stranger just as peremptorily as Shabana was. In secular society, forcing girls to have sex with unknown men is called pimping, and it is straightforwardly a crime. If it’s done under the umbrella of religion, and the girl is handed over for marriage rather than prostitution, then it is no longer a crime. But from the point of view of the girl, the experience is much the same – she is forced to have sex with a stranger. She also has no ability to decide the shape of her life for herself; she is an object of exchange between men, handed over like furniture or farm equipment.
Child marriage and early childbirth can cause physical damage to girls. In particular it can cause fistula, a hole in the wall between the vagina and the bladder or rectum. Every year from 50,000 to 100,000 women giving birth in poor countries are left with this affliction [2], which renders them incontinent, wet, smelly, and ostracized. Child marriage is one of those practices that are part religion, part custom, and that, whatever the causal proportions are, religion makes much harder to reform.
The BBC spoke to one such woman during an international conference on maternal health in October 2007. Halima Gouroukoye of Niamey, Niger, was 13 when her parents arranged her marriage; she wasn’t happy about it but they told her the prospective husband was a good man and would look after her. She got pregnant after her first period and gave birth at 14. She was ill throughout her pregnancy but she still had to do all her usual work – collect wood, prepare meals, clean the house and care for her husband as well as work in the fields. She was in labour for two days at home, then went to a clinic, where she was told she would need a Caesarian.
[B]ut the doctor sent me home because I couldn't afford the operation.
I had to wait for my family to collect the money to pay for the operation. Then we drove to Niamey which took a day. By that stage I had been in labour for days. I didn't know where I was, I was almost unconscious. [3]
The baby died, and three days later Halima realized she couldn’t hold her urine. She didn’t tell her husband, but went home to her parents. Everyone thought she was cursed. Two months later she returned to Niamey, where an NGO provided her with the operation to mend the fistula.
Dr. Kees Waaldijk runs a clinic for fistula patients in Katsina, Nigeria. He has operated on 15,000 fistulas in twenty two years, repairing nearly all of them.
Safiya, 23, was in the post-op ward after living for a year in the hut of a traditional healer who tried to cure her by stuffing potions into her vagina. Daso, 23, said she had leaked urine and feces for five years. Her husband divorced her.
Rumasau, 16, unluckily began labor on a Saturday, when her local hospital had no physician for her. She had to wait until the following Tuesday for an emergency Caesarean section. [4]
The operation is simple and nearly always successful, but the number of new cases is far outpacing repairs, and many girls are repaired simply to be re-broken. ‘To be a woman in Africa is truly a terrible thing,’ Dr Waaldijk observed. [5]
But not only in Africa.
Mami, they are not treating me
Abortion is tightly restricted in several South American countries. Columbia used to have a total ban, until its Constitutional Court ruled on May 10 2006 that abortion in cases of rape, fetal malformation and endangerment of the life of the mother should be legal. The lawsuit was brought before the Court by Monica Roa of Women's Link Worldwide, who was the target of death threats, burglaries, and charges of genocide in the course of her effort. Her opponents were senior figures within the Church, who are enormously powerful in a country where more than 90% of the population is Catholic. [6]
Nicaragua redressed the balance by enacting its own blanket ban in November 2006, joining Chile and El Salvador as the three countries in the world to have such total bans. The law was ratified by the National Assembly in September 2007. Both the original enactment and the vote in September 2007 were widely attributed to the desire of political parties to ensure and maintain support from the Roman Catholic Church and the Evangelical Church. Human Rights Watch issued a report in October that year on the serious effects the ban was having on the lives and health of women and girls. HRW found no prosecutions of doctors under the new law, yet also that ‘the mere possibility of facing criminal charges for providing lifesaving health services has had a deadly effect.’ [7]
Sofía M.’s doctor told Human Rights Watch she had been diagnosed years earlier with a mental imbalance that causes her to be violent whenever she is not medicated. In March 2007, when she discovered she was pregnant, Sofía M. knew she could not carry the pregnancy to term. She said, “I don’t want to kill. But in my case, I couldn’t have the child…It would not be born healthy because I can’t stop taking the medicine.…If I can’t even take care of me, how would I take care of a child?”
Sofía M. and her mother went from one clinic to another, but no one wanted to carry out the abortion because of the law: “They said they couldn’t do it because it is illegal.” She finally found a clandestine provider through a friend and told Human Rights Watch of the added anxiety in having to procure illegal services: “I was afraid; I did not know what it was going to be like. [8]
Others were not so lucky.
Angela M.’s 22-year-old daughter is another case in point. Her pregnancy-related hemorrhaging was left untreated for days at a public hospital in Managua, despite the obligation, even under Nicaraguan law and guidelines, to treat such life threatening emergencies. In November 2006, only days after the blanket ban on abortion was implemented, Angela M. told Human Rights Watch of the pronounced lack of attention: “She was bleeding.… That’s why I took her to the emergency room … but the doctors said that she didn’t have anything.… Then she felt worse [with fever and hemorrhaging] and on Tuesday they admitted her. They put her on an IV and her blood pressure was low.… She said. ‘Mami, they are not treating me.’…They didn’t treat at all, nothing.”
From comments made by the doctors at the time, Angela M. believes her daughter was left untreated because doctors were reluctant to treat a pregnancy-related emergency for fear that they might be accused of providing therapeutic abortion. Angela M.’s daughter was finally transferred to another public hospital in Managua, but too late: “She died of cardiac arrest.… She was all purple, unrecognizable. It was like it wasn’t my daughter at all.” [9]
Chile’s 1874 penal code made abortion illegal in all cases; in 1931 a national health law allowed doctors to give legal abortions where necessary to save the pregnant woman’s life or health. In 1989 General Pinochet, as one of his last acts in office, annulled this statutory exception to the general illegality of abortion; thus the law now prohibits abortion in all circumstances. Nevertheless a very large number of women risk illegal and thus unsafe abortions every year; surveys indicate that 35% of all pregnancies in Chile end in abortion, which translates to about 160,000 abortions per year, 64,000 of them by girls under eighteen. Illegal abortion is a leading cause of maternal mortality in Chile. [10]
In Lublin, Poland, a 14-year-old schoolgirl known by the pseudonym ‘Agata’ said she was raped by a fellow student and left covered in bruises and pregnant. She and her mother applied for permission to have an abortion, which in Poland is legal up to twelve weeks in cases of rape, but when they went to the hospital, Agata was shown, alone, into a room where a priest was waiting. The doctor returned later and said she would not perform the abortion; Agata says the doctor and the priest dictated a letter in which she agreed to keep the baby, and she complied just to get some peace. Her mother contacted the Women's Federation in Warsaw and, with their help, found a clinic willing to perform the abortion, but when they arrived they found the same priest waiting, along with anti-abortion campaigners; the doctors then refused to perform the abortion. Agata told the Gazeta Wyborcza that she wants to be a mother later, not now. [11]
Footnotes
1. Carolyn Jessup, The Guardian, December 15 2007.
2. UN Population Fund, Campaign to End Fistula, http://www.endfistula.org/fistula_brief.htm, accessed September 28 2008.
3. BBC News, ‘They thought I was cursed’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/7050934.stm, accessed December 16 2007.
4. Sharon LaFraniere, ‘Nightmare for African Women: Birthing Injury and Little Help’, The New York Times, September 28 2005.
5. Ibid.
6. Andrew Buncombe, The Independent, October 13 2005.
7. Human Rights Watch.
8. Ibid, pp. 9-10.
9. Ibid, p. 13.
10. Human Rights Watch, ‘Abortion: Chile’, http://www.hrw.org/women/abortion/chile.html,
accessed June 23 2008.
11. Derek Scally, 'Polish girl caught up in row has abortion', The Irish Times, June 23 2008.