In the last little while, the international community (regardless of who we are and what we are – this is too important not to affect everyone!) has been shocked by the case of the Indiana-living Purvi Patel, the first woman to be effectively sentenced to what will, if the sentence is not in some way revoked, mean spending the rest of her life in prison… for suffering a miscarriage.
It's needless to say that tempers and opinions are running high – from the holier-than-thou extremists praising the decision, based, as it were, on their own extremist laws (or did you think this happened by accident?!), and hoping to soon see even more people forced into compliance with their extremism, to the erudite populace everywhere being shocked and affronted by what can, sadly, only be compared to the deeds of ISIS in the East and the rapes and violence in India.
As an anthropologist working on terrain in Eastern Europe (Slovenia to be precise – another pit for human rights), I was perhaps less surprised by the court ruling than others, but what definitely attracted my attention was the questions nobody, regardless of their standing on human rights (where I include the right to abortion, only curtailed in the name of religion, of which I will speak presently!), seemed to be asking themselves.
That a court of a state favouring what is dangerously close to religious law – hence my comparison to ISIS – would choose to condemn a woman this way did not surprise me. I have seen enough in my life to recognise extremism, and, as my partner put so well when we spoke of the case, the states leaning to conservatism and extremism in the US – regardless of the otherwise wonderfully democratic political system! – are furiously trying to bite back at the decisions which have been approved of in utter disregard of their religious issues… the gay rights, the children's rights, the greater and greater demand for gender equality, the rights of those who do not happen to be Caucasian, which is pretty much an insult to people who deem colour, race, religion, sex/gender, orientation and religious standing above all else in their petty, intolerant minds. Extremism is the same everywhere – for the last half a decade and more, I have devoted most of my research to extremism and to its formation and application in society, and I am not so foolish as not to read the signs… and the States have been a battlefield of extreme versus democratic for at least as long.
But there is another problem in the Patel case that forms an issue, and which did not seem to be addressed anywhere. I wish to remind you that my resources are limited, and that I am working solely from what is publicly available at the moment – but with that information in mind, this is what attracted my attention.
Patel, a woman of 33, was allegedly pregnant between 23-24 weeks when she miscarried; sources mention that she is from a conservative Hindu family, that she was unmarried and that she lived at home.
She has reportedly explained that she was afraid to tell her family of her pregnancy. Also reportedly, Patel has not sought to terminate her pregnancy earlier and via a clinic (http://www.womensmed.com/laws/new-indiana-abortion-law/), but has surfed the internet looking for abortion drugs, which, purchased or not (information on this is sketchy), were not in her system when the toxicological screen was done on her after her miscarriage.
She is also reported to have delivered suddenly in a bathroom, panicked, wrapped the foetus (! Everyone keeps referring to it as a "foetus", yet a child at that stage is pretty advanced and very closely resembles a person!) in some towels and disposed of it via the paper bin.
These are the reported facts.
Now for the debate.
First of all – Ms. Patel comes from a conservative Hindu family. As most probably know, India is big on honour killings, even when the woman wasn't in fact a willing part of the intercourse, but had it forced on her. Given the advancing extremism in states such as Indiana, it would be very easy – terrifyingly so – for her to have no true protection from the state itself in the case of retribution for her state. If Patel was afraid to address the issue of her pregnancy with her family (this brings tears to eyes and frustration to boil – a 33-year-old woman in a Western country, working to support the very people who are unlikely to be at the very least decent enough to understand that this is the 21st century and her decision!), she was highly likely to feel hesitant about visiting a clinic, even if that was an option.
One might be seen… people may talk… Yes, the risk is much smaller in reality than a person may feel, but the fear is embedded into people from extremist families/environments from childhood on. Somehow, they often feel that, almost uncannily, their "misdeed" will be unearthed and they will be punished.
This means that an internet search may feel safer. Internet has become a part of our lives to such an extent we rarely consider including it, even if we feel that what we are doing should remain a secret; receiving a packet, also, may seem easier than taking "visible" action in form of visiting an institution that is connected with a specific social, cultural or religious issue (such as an abortion clinic or a gay bar, for instance). Also to consider – how greatly educated was Ms. Patel about sexuality, pregnancy, prevention etc.? In my experience, even repressive Western cultures or cultural groups may be less than clear on it all… and Ms. Patel's background is a rather forbidding one where sexual education, especially of women, is concerned.
It is likely that Ms. Patel, frightened and uncertain, sought for all possible ways out of her situation, while, at the same time, being too frightened to actually act – the fact supported by the tox screen.
Secondly – where is the baby's father? Thus far, the one mention of how Ms. Patel became pregnant in the first place is in NBC News, stating that she had had a relationship with a co-worker. Where is the father now? Presumably, abuse is excluded, but this doesn't explain why Ms. Patel received no help from him, or, presumably, did not necessarily even tell him. Is the father married? Is he simply not the "right kind", for example, not Hindi? To an extremist family, the issue of abuse is one of punishing the victim – this is true of everyone everywhere insofar as they follow extremist thought. And as for not marrying the "right kind", well, that pretty much seems impossible, and is treated as such, and with equal wish to punish.
How does it come to this?
Extremism isn't a natural mind set of human race in general; it is a pathological pattern of taught behaviour, spread through generations by fear, abuse, manipulation and literally weeding out the "wrong people". It is not aimed solely at women (even if this claim may upset some more fervent feminists) – it is aimed at everyone everywhere.
My research, basing heavily on many sciences and scientists, and most notably on two great anthropological minds of the last two centuries, Emile Durkheim and Clifford Geertz, has shown that it is heavily hierarchical; at the top, there is an abusive matriarch, a woman, always a matron, who controls her sons – the punishers – and, via them, other women, often even within their own family. This is strongly confirmed by many studies – most notably the ones conducted in post-intifada Palestine (Suicide in Palestine: Narratives of Despair, by Nadia Taysir Dabbagh) and by observation of many cultures in many times. These women, the epitome of the "monster in law" and monstrous even to their own daughters (with known cases of mothers encouraging sexual abuse and murder of their daughters via their sons!), are the women who have moulded to the indoctrination which teaches "proper behaviour", with the only desirable ending for a woman being a married mother with sons. This is a maladaptation – an enforced response that they adopted to keep themselves safe.
The men, on the other hand, undergo a training to become murderers and rapists in the name of "goodness", also from early age on.
And it is a behaviour taught to Christian men and women by their mothers in the West – in his article on gay mysogeny, Mr. robw77, responding to the comment made by the actress Rose McGowan (Charmed), spoke of a blog in which an American Christian mother explains how she drums her extremism into her sons where women and their behaviour to them is concerned… shockingly closely resembling the speech of the Indian rapist Mukesh Singh, who specified that women had to be punished, should know that they should be punished and should never fight back, and that there are maybe 20% of "good girls" (read subdued into extreme) out there… the rest are potential victims and targets (article in the BBC).
It is as bad and worse in the Eastern Europe and the Third World… the referencing could go on for hours.
Religion plays a crucial role in all indoctrination, regardless of the religion itself. Because religion becomes the irrefutable (something that both Geertz and Durkheim specified in their works), it also becomes the epitome of the "big brother". In other words – even if no one is watching, there is always the paranoid belief that the "wrong doing" will be punished, because there is no such thing as privacy, there is no such thing as a self… there is just the all-knowing something, mirrored in the community, which will get you for whatever you may have done or even thought wrong.
Not all men and women do this. Some break and often literally fade away; others are broken, even killed. Others again are broken but kept alive in virtual slavery to this horrifying mental state. And there are those who embrace it – this is a form of hugely pathological, empathy-lacking form of appeasement – and this is where the monsters live.
The most terrifying thing is the fact that they are allowed to do all this and make laws, because, as Dr. Winell points out in her article on RTS, religion is the untouchable… in my opinion because, however far we have come from it in some places, a feeling of unease still persists.
Passing the anthropological theory (if anything with so much living evidence can ever even be called a theory!), we are left with Ms. Patel, her missing partner and the issue at hand.
As I have specified before, fear is the likeliest reason for Ms. Patel to have acted the way she has, from the fact that she concealed her state of pregnancy to looking for a solution online to her last fearful act of wrapping up the body of her baby and hoping to dispose of it via a paper bin.
Fear. Fear for her life, perhaps, or just enduring shame and physical and emotional abuse? Has anyone even bothered to look into that? It does not sound so, even given the fact that conservative Hindu families do practice honour killings.
It occurs to me that, if Ms. Patel was to be, say, burnt alive (something that is the usual practice in similar cases in India!), the papers would mention with some sympathy, the authorities may or may not bring the culprits to justice, but Ms. Patel would most likely still been dead, or badly injured at least, and scarred, emotionally and physically, for life.
Ms. Patel did not, so it seems, take the abortive drugs in the end. Healthy women don't simply lose their baby – where is the pathologist's report on the body of the infant? Where is the doctor's report on her health? A baby that young would have little chance surviving even with medical help – mostly, babies from seventh month on seem to be capable of surviving and developing to the end in the incubator (http://umm.edu/health/medical/pregnancy/labor-and-delivery/what-happens-if-my-baby-is-born-prematurely), while Patel seems to have been six months pregnant when she miscarried. What, then, went wrong?
No answers to that, apparently.
Because the demonisation and the punishment, which is aimed to show others, male and female, of the extremist power that is in law-wielding control in Indiana, is the real aim of this court ruling!
What would Patel have done if she had carried to term? Would she have become a killer, commiting an infanticide? Would she have secretly given the baby up for adoption?
The likelihood is that Patel herself did not have a clear picture of what would happen. That she wrapped the baby up the way she did and tried to dispose of it certainly shows that she'd been unable to develop any feelings about it. To her, it was most probably a thing, a fear-inducing, blood-curdling thing that was going to have her entire life ruined for her, because of the extremist environment of her family. This is not the best way of developing warm feelings – it is a way to become unable to have feelings, because the only thing you can think of is how to save yourself.
I am familiar with a case (back in the 60s Yugoslavia) of a young Bosnian woman, who went to Ljubljana, somehow managed to have a baby and, on the way back to Bosnia, threw the infant to its death off the train, because she knew she would be, at best, an outcast if she returned an unmarried mother, and, at worst, dead, as would her baby.
What is very interesting is the fact that Patel's baby, however depersonalised it may have been by its mother, has been further depersonalised by the media.
As my partner pointed out (everyone needs a Watson), the socially recognised "difference" between a foetus and a baby is often simply in it being outside of the woman's body. For a baby this old, this formed already, to not be perceived as a human being, a baby, a little person, but simply as a foetus, is unusual. Especially given that the foeticide charges are beyond ridiculous is Patel's tox screen didn't show any abortive drugs.
I am, by no means, a doctor, and I will not debate whether abortive drugs are safe or not. Even the medically developed procedures and drugs can be and are often less than safe, and can and will have side-effects; and while abortive drugs are being developed medically and there are already studies and discussions concerning them (http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3816412.html), the long-standing testing of years of usage are still to come and to inform us of their overall safety; they are increasingly becoming used at home and instead of the usual medical procedure, however, and the referenced article mentions, among other things, that "In settings where abortion is illegal or highly restricted, it has provided many women for the first time with a safe and discreet means for early termination of unwanted pregnancy."
But again, this is not about the safety of the drugs – medical or black market -, it is about the enforcement of extremist beliefs on men and women out there, in this case Indiana, in other cases everywhere else extremism raises its ugly head.
Men have the right to be non-macho gentlemen. They have a right not to expect their women to fear them. They have a right to be gay (possibly the ultimate, or so it is often perceived by extremists, "other" to the abusive, punishing macho). And above all, they have a right to know that their mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, wives and lovers are not going to be raped, and then raped again if the state decides they should carry the child to term!
Women have a right to decide about their bodies, and to take that decision for the sake of themselves, and not because they are frightened, or feel that they will be discriminated against one way or another!
No one has the right to force us into anything, gender regardless, and I deliberately started the above speech about men and women with men, because they are too often overlooked, as it the role of pathological women in what so many call subjugation of women.
Had Patel not been scared, had she lived in a normal environment (both at home and in her state), she may have just said – I'm gonna have a baby. Wow.
But she could not.
Because the decisions, be it about childbirth and abortion, or about life choices (schooling and work, for example), sexual orientation and so on, are, in the case of extremists, not in our hands, and by us I mean all of us, because all rights should be about equality for all.
I mentioned, at the start of the article, that I shall speak a bit more about the right to abortion and the issue of religion.
From all I have seen thus far, religion is always brought in as the last defence everywhere. You hate women working? No problem, bring in your religious feelings. You think there should be no mixed marriage? No problem, religion is there for you. You hate "fags" and you want to kill them? Yay for religion! You hate pink sugar-covered doughnuts? No problem, pretty sure you could bring in religion here as well.
WHY??
Because there is no reason in religion. There are no reasoned beliefs. There is no true danger to extremists if two men or two women marry (currently a big issue here in Slovenia). But since there is no way this can be proven, since they will insist that they are this way endangered, and will proceed to endanger everyone else, the remaining, unindoctrinated society often feels there is no other way but to cave in. And then, there is the next step, and the next.
Abortion is a pain in the side of extremists because they cannot force a woman to carry a baby they forced into her for them.
They cannot force her to be broken. They cannot force working, sane relationships into either complying with their rules or breaking apart (or what do you think happens all too often when a woman does keep a baby which reminds her of rape every second of the day, and becomes completely estranged from her partner?).
They cannot force the men not to be gentlemen, and become the ruthless, careless raping and killing machines.
And above all, they cannot force our children to grow up in their way, thus enabling the pathology to go on.
Abortion is a right, and should be a basic right of every woman… but again, it should not be because prevention is unavailable, it should not be because of fear.
I stand firmly pro abortion. But I want to remind everyone of the little picture I saw once, of a teen, pregnant, thinking: My mom is going to kill me, with her thoughts echoed by the baby in her.
If you're cringing and thinking, bleh, that is anti-abortion speech, yes, I can see you could certainly think this way, and I will admit that it has most likely been used this way quite a lot (for one, I've seen people using it myself!).
But that's not the point. The point is that a decision should be taken by every person themselves. Not because they fear their parents. Not because they fear their god. Not because they fear the extremist law. Not because someone tells them to.
Ms. Patel, like all women, like all people out there, should have been given the right to choice, which she did not have.
She should be given the right not to be used as a showcase for the extremists to flex their muscles at us, with the threat of spending what is the remainder of her life in prison, all due to her fear and her unwelcoming, extremist environment.
There is a petition coursing at the moment to pardon Ms. Patel, which would not only be of help to her, but also as a reminder to the extremists that they cannot wield their power over people who are free in thought and free in deed, something that the States pretty much put into their very essence, via the Constitution, as set down by the founding fathers – including the bit about having the right not to have religion and be oppressed by it, which has, since, become a major thing of human rights anyhow elsewhere in the West.
There is the petition to not only pardon a woman for suffering a miscarriage, but to ensure all women and men from being mistreated by religious bigotry and hate.
Did I sign it?
Of course I have.
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