“There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.”- Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu.
Nothing seemed more appropriate to open this topic with than Montesquieu’s wise words. Here he questions the workings of law and how the slightest shift of fidelity towards it can turn the course of life towards destruction.
To live through 2022 and watch unrelated fragments of the world make laws on women is abominable. Leonardo Da Vinci in his celebrated painting ‘The Last Supper ‘ conveyed the significance of a woman in our society. He regarded a woman’s womb as the ‘holy grail’ which has the power to carry generations across time.
A woman is a living metaphor for omphalos. She is the nexus between life and oblivion. Yet it is the same Woman who has faced discrimination at the hands of elements she delivered life to.
We live in a world where there exist issues like environmental crises, economic crises, lack of daily aid for humans, Imperialism, and the list doesn’t stop. Yet there are high-profile dunces holding important political and social positions who think nothing on earth is more important than telling women what to do.
A woman has been blessed cerebrally equal to a man. No study has claimed anything otherwise to date. But people in power just do not seem to align their thoughts to the fact that women are fully capable of addressing normal human issues and finding a solution that suits their surroundings, sometimes better than their counterfeit according to studies.
For someone who keeps track of daily affairs, it isn’t unconventional to come across 4 out of 10 news that addresses injustice against women on a daily basis. Sometimes the digit goes higher.
Roe v. Wade, 1973, was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States protects a pregnant woman’s liberty to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction. The decision struck down many U.S. federal and state abortion laws.
Recently, this law that legalized abortion in the US was overturned by the Judiciary in 2022 back to criminalizing any kind of abortion inside the country.
This means any woman including young girls who get impregnated during rape cannot get aborted and have to carry and give birth to the child. The Judiciary when asked said that rape victims who aren’t fully grown adults are way too young to undergo the abortion procedure.
We cannot comprehend how young girls cannot bear abortion but can give birth to a child having full responsibility for the child’s upbringing.
Read more: Anti-hijab protests taking place across Iran: what triggered it?
In a similar way, women who face complications in pregnancy are usually advised by doctors to get an abortion but in the US they cannot. As a result, the female population in the need of abortion can only get one if they fly out of the US to some other country to get it done which most of them cannot afford.
This is claiming absolute ownership of a woman’s body and then destroying it. It is baleful! Another recent case of discrimination against a woman is the controversy that whirled up around a 22-year-old Iranian woman’s death in police custody.
Mahsa Amini, who originally belonged to Kurdistan, was traveling to Tehran when she was detained by Iran’s morality police on charges of not wearing her hijab properly. The police are alleged to have tortured and beaten the young woman in a way that she ended up in a hospital and eventually died.
Following the incident, anti-hijab protests started to cross Iran where many women have been seen burning their hijabs and cutting their hair. This incident is pure discrimination and exploitation of women by the government of Iran in the name of religion.
Large countries like the ones in America and Europe who claim the existence of gender equality inside their boundary still have a divergent pay scale for the same amount of work done by a woman and a man.
Divorce laws in certain parts of the world are another problematic aspect. In Malaysia, a woman getting a divorce has to go through coarse adjudication but a man, on the other hand, can get away with a trivial fine.
And the list of absurd laws against women doesn’t seem to stop.
This is injustice and rather should be proclaimed as an act of cruelty that engulfs hundreds and thousands of women across the world daily almost making it impossible for their boat to sail. This kind of injustice needs to come to an end!
