Treat her like a lady, not a baby-making machine
Kaneez* has five young children with a small age difference between them. She works full-time as a domestic maid and takes short, rushed breaks in order to nurse her youngest child, a five-month-old infant. If her break becomes longer than the expected five minutes, she is severely rebuked by her employer. Life is hard for Kaneez. Not only does her husband expect her to make ends meet, but also wants her to keep adding more children to the brood. Her children fight all the time, demand clothes and toys when she takes them grocery shopping and throw tantrums when their ...
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Steal a baby, sell a baby
Fact is stranger than fiction. At least with fiction, you can chew out the author for writing a predictable ending or for using outlandish plot twists. Sadly, some stories in life seem to be built entirely on outlandish plot twists. On the 22nd of March, the police in Bhara Kahu, right outside Islamabad, busted a couple who stand accused of conducting illegal abortions, including dangerous late-stage ones, and selling the babies that survived. Sounds a lot like Hell’s version of the sustainable development model. To top it off, the couple shares a bond of blood with one of the accused in ...
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The role of men in contraception
In a constitutionally Islamic country riddled with contrasts, far away from the welfare model, perpetually confused on nearly all critical issues ranging from foreign policy to population planning, infamous for low status of women and girls and their social exclusion, and characterised by the dramatic capture of power elites in politics and development fields both, one wonders — what does the male role or involvement in family planning mean to Pakistan? I tried to come up with a plausible definition of male involvement in family planning in 1999 after noticing its absence in the literature. It reads: Male involvement in Family ...
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Money 101: All women need a job
Happy Women’s Day everyone! I am amazed at how the Pakistani woman has evolved in the last 20 years. Away from the land of saas bahu TV shows, she is well aware of her rights and will not be intimidated by male co-workers. In fact, she is most likely to outperform them and get that promotion! Our mothers fought for options – so that we could choose between staying at home or going out to work. But I feel that it is compulsory for every woman to have some form of part-time, flexible hours work, even if it is not the 9 to ...
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The people we are made of
I have an obsession with numbers. They epitomise knowledge in many ways and surveys give us a plethora of numbers and figures to handle and realize the reality of various beliefs and problems in our society. Although social science research remains limited in the country, the surveys conducted by the government do present us with some figures to assess. However, these are almost always never expounded upon and besides the obvious press release that states the executive summary of the reports, the entire news media and blogosphere never addresses them. In that very spirit, I thought that I should highlight ...
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