The Dead Body of Womanhood

A picture of a guy carrying a dead body of a girl has been doing rounds on the internet for days now. In case you don’t know, let me give you an overview of what happened. The guy named Usama and the deceased girl Maryam were in a relationship and she had gotten pregnant. The girl then got some money from her parents saying that it for her university fee and decided to get an abortion(not like they had any other option), but due to a complication in the abortion process, she lost a lot of blood and died. After which the boy carried her dead body into a private hospital’s emergency ward and left it there. The guy and his car were spotted in the CCTV camera footage of the hospital and he was later arrested from his house.

A heartbreaking incident for two reasons, one for the mere happening of this incident, a girl dying because she could not get proper health care and secondly and most importantly for the reaction of our people. The responses that were prominent amongst all were, “why they had sex before marriage?, they got what they deserved”, “All girls should see, this is where these relationships take you, the guy left her dead in a hospital”, “The girl was shameless, her family will be ashamed of her”.

The numbness of the society has gone down to the level where they don’t care about the death of a person but they don’t care about what caused her death. People care to remind the dead girl and everyone else how they should live their lives. Moral policing over a dead body, that’s the level we have gone down to.

Let me ask some questions on each of these reactions. The first kind of reaction was that they did wrong by having sex before marriage and they should have been punished. To which I ask, is the state not responsible for the health care of the people who don’t follow one particular faith? If someone does not think like the majority then they don’t deserve to live? Everyone is entitled to their opinion but when a state functions, it should not see faith or beliefs.

Another argument that has been circulating on the internet is that this is how such relationships end; they humiliate you and your families. The representation of two people liking each other and being in a relationship as something evil and devilish is as stupid a concept as I have heard in my entire life. We as a society have made loving a criminal act. People are afraid of showing affectionate emotions towards one another because of this engraved sense of guilt. How can liking someone be bad? Its nature, adults would find other adults attractive and want to mate with them, that’s basic biology. But we have made this thing a taboo in our society.

The argument here should be why were not they trained to prevent this unwanted pregnancy to happen? Why didn’t they take precautionary measures? The answer again lies with our system. Whenever an incident of child abuse or sexual assault happens, a small portion of society talks about sexual education, they talk about providing our young people with information on how to handle their sexuality with care. In this specific incident as well, If the girl and boy had gotten enough training about safe sex and contraception then this whole thing could have been avoided. But talking about that is also thought to be a taboo in our society.

This is what the feminist movement means when they say ” mera jism, meri marzi”. Every person should have the right over their bodies, if Maryam had the right over her body, she would have been alive today. Or let’s just say that if she lived in a “faithless” western society, she would have gotten better health care and she would be alive today. It’s high time that we realize that everyone does not operate on the same moral compass as you, and people deserve to be treated equally regardless of their lifestyles, opinions, genders and faiths. Abortion is the right of any women; she has the right over her body. To summarize the whole scenario, the killer was not the boy, it was our society. The dead body of Maryam symbolized the denied basic human rights, dead dreams and ambitions of the girls and women of our society. It wasn’t just Maryam’s dead body; it was the dead body of Womanhood.