She was 25.
She was fighting for her life. Rushed to the emergency room in a critical condition with a low blood pressure, bleeding inside the abdomen was suspected. The surgeons and gynecologist (woman's doctor) took her to the operation room and opened her abdomen.
They found multiple adhesions (eltisakaat) and a pregnancy that could not progress because the baby was implanted outside the uterus, that's called ectopic pregnancy.
The doctor had no option but to remove her uterus (ra7em), ovaries and tubes.
It would become impossible for this young lady, with no children and two previous unplanned abortions, to become pregnant again.
She was tested for what could be causing this, and turns out she had a sexually-transmitted disease.
Again, she's 25, and she comes from a conservative environment.
We turned to the husband, who also comes from a conservative background. He confessed that in some of his travels outside Jordan for work, he had sexual encounters with some women in the Far East.
He got infected but wasn't too concerned, sometimes these infections don't cause symptoms. He took some pills and the infection was gone, but prior to that he had passed the infection to his wife not knowing he had one, and of course not telling her about the women he'd met in his trips.
I saw her, as a student, a few days after the operation.
I asked her, "How old are you"?
"Twenty-five and a half"
I was surprised why did she emphasize "the half"
"For how long have you been married?"
"Ten years, exactly ten, I was fifteen and half when I got married"
"Do you know what happened?"
"I know everything"
".... the infection...?"
"Yes" and she looked up as if she didn't want to comment further.
She was laying there, in a bed out of six in a crowded room in one of Amman's hospitals. Silent, broken, shaken, phsycially healing but emotionally traumatized.
He did it, he slept around, and betrayed her and her got the infection, but she's the one who suffered, maybe because life is unfair and maybe because you don't always receive as much as you give even if it was your teenage years and half of your life, or maybe she was just lucky that she would never get pregnant from that man, called husband.
Beside her was the husband, the strong powerful teenage-loving macho, who can travel and sleep with a woman after another without being responsible for the consequences.
He was looking down, maybe ashamed of what he did, or maybe just planning a new marriage, how he can get rid of this woman, this machine which had become useless after it lost the capacity to have kids.
I was always against honor crimes.
Now I'm having second thoughts. The only thing is that they might be directed against the wrong gender.
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