Sunday, August 12, 2007

How we need to honor..... honor crimes


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.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

poor girl.. how sad!
Yeah, he might have got married and by now has a bunch of kids, while she might have been sent back to her parents house to serve as a maid!!!

Anonymous said...

It is a shame..
Don't worry, Allah will take care of him..Maybe he will find soon that he's not really cured,and the infection is still festering in his system and can't be with anybody...This is a better punishment..
As for her, I hope she has a very understanding,supportive family..We have come so far,but not far enough..

M Kilany said...

Unbelievable... what a heartbreaking story... I can't help thinking how real life is sometimes more dramatic than movies...

Music to your Mood said...

Guys.. I just want you to imagine this stuation in your minds: what is it was the other way around?? If this girl cheated on him, would she even be alive?? He deprived her from the chance of being a mother forever because he can't control himself..

I hope he doesn't ruin another woman's life..

Anonymous said...

How unfair by the male gender society can be ,and what a waste of young productive years for some one like this young lady,and society still condom her gender and point a finger of silent blame and ugly loud condemnation .It is one of the most unfortunate facts that still dominate our society "The male adulation " and allows him to rise above all wrongs .I cant but admire you Doc. for the way you express your feelings to such cases ,you brake the wall of silence ,and point to what is wrong in such a society ,at times I feel that your differential diagnosis goose from the biological mode to the moral mode ,I guess this is why I find your blog interesting .

Anonymous said...

an article that is worth your time to read , Copy and paste : http://www.asharqalawsat.com/leader.asp?section=3&article=432125&issue=10484
Inn_aa Kedaa_Huma La_3azeem

Maher said...

This is wrong! OH DEAR!
allah y3eeenha!
some people just love hurting others!

Anonymous said...

Hareega, this was heartbreaking. Publish it! Maybe enough broken hearts will change some laws.

Hareega said...

secratea,
possibly, and nobody would wanna marry her

noura,
i don't know about her family, sometimes the family treats her worse than how her husband would treat her.

m kilany
it is, but there's no one who'll make a movie out of this

nano112,
her very possibly can, and if she's done the same thing he did she would have been in a miserable situation (if alive)

Hareega said...

nadim,
thanks a lot for your support, and my differential diagnosis is usually a mess!

anonymous... thanks for the link, i read the article , pretty interesting, never heard about that man before!

maher,
that's true

kiniz,
with six women already in the parliament some of them supprtive of honor crimes i'm not too optimisitc. Unfotunately a lot of Jordanians seem to support them.

lubna said...

in 99% of the cases, they're being directed to the wrong gender.
Screw the screwed mentality

Hareega said...

lubna.. 99.9%,
why the underestimate?

Anonymous said...

Seriously, this is sick and disturbing. If you do not care about your freakin self, at least think about the poor woman who most probably did not want to be with you in the first place.