Thanks to the Kenya Law Students Society,
And congratulations to our law students and faculty for launching this campaign to promote awareness about reproductive health being a fundamental right. When I enquired from the organisers I was given a number of concerns that they had in this field. They mentioned FGM, wife-beating and wife inheritance, abortion and contraception, HIV and AIDS, cancer awareness and others.
I doubt if in this enlightened audience, there are persons who will want to justify any of these practices. In the larger society those who support or engage in FGM, wife-beating and wife inheritance have no positive benefits to offer – their recourse is almost always to tradition and culture, both of which are ever evolving and reforming.
As for the debate on abortion and contraception – I strongly believe that, as for now and until science makes some gigantic leap, that these matters are the concern of women, ALL women – they affect deeply and fundamentally their bodies, their careers, their education, their future – in fact their lives. It is only reasonable that they should have total control over planning their destiny. Remember, it is only the wearer of the shoe who knows where it pinches.
One cannot ignore the very heated debates and even violent actions that engulf the question of abortion and contraception – I think I am right in saying that these are almost always faith-based, I have yet to understand why religious arguments always have to be so bellicose and aggressive. In any case Kenya is a secular country, we have a secular constitution, in which any religious body is free to make certain demands on its followers. What I do not think they have any right to do is to impose those demands on the non-followers.
My approach to the topic of reproductive health rights is going to be socio economic and political rather than biological. We talk of these as individual rights: women’s rights, men’s rights, the rights of gays and other sexual minorities, etc. Yet none of us is an island unto herself or himself. We are social beings, we live in a society and the very basic unit of society is the FAMILY. But we do not talk much about the family, do we? We take it as a given.
And yet no matter how many reproductive rights we draft, provide and try to implement; the final decision on the execution of that right will be made in the family. And unfortunately this unit is not one happy family whose members think alike and cooperate for the good of all. Far from it!
The family as we know it today is a den of competing power relations and incompatible contradictions, often quite violent. Who makes the decisions in the family? How are they made? And for whose benefit? These are questions which every family has to battle with, and there are no easy solutions. We usually think of women as being the victims of these tensions, but so are the men and the children. So then are we doomed as humanity to live and die in this murky pond?
First of all – let us be aware that the family in its present form is barely 5 thousand years old. For most of our 200 000 year history we have lived in matriarchal societies where the children belonged to their mother and her brother – that was the blood line and that is what formed the family. The biological father was just a visitor to the homestead.
Remnants of matriarchal societies can be found even today. So over time the family has evolved. We then developed the extended family system. And when we moved from a subsistence existence to producing a surplus – concerns of ownership, control and availability of labour surfaced. The notion of ‘property’ was born, and as you all know, women and children became ‘property’. That is why we pay dowry.
Now we are in the process of establishing nuclear families - mother, father and their children - and the extended family is slowly eroding. Together with the evolution of the family, another very important process has been on-going. During the subsistence, and even early extended family modes of production, the group worked as one unit in one area to sustain and to reproduce themselves.
But in the present capitalist system which is global, the work sphere has been separated from the home domain. You go out to work and return home to relax and get your sustenance for the next day’s job. You work in a public sphere where working relations are socialised. But the family on the other hand is considered PRIVATE and PERSONAL. That is why we never talk about it, leave alone critique it. And why the state does not so-called ‘interfere’.
In the system in which we are living, the primary role of the family is to produce and nurture the next generation of workers. And that duty falls squarely on the shoulders of the mother, and if she is very lucky, a supportive father. But most importantly note that the state takes no responsibility though the function is essential for the survival of the human race.
I am only able to accept your invitation to come and speak to you all here today because of one simple reality – there is a maid who is cleaning my house, preparing my dinner and who will care for my son when he returns home from school. Without her I doubt that I would have found the time to write this paper, leave alone present it.
So when we agree that reproductive health is a fundamental right, as it should be, we should be concerned about how we plan to implement that right? I could, to fight for my rights, maybe find the means and the time to go to FIDA, to court, to a counsellor, to an HIV Clinic, for a cervical and breast cancer check ….. What about that maid? How will she enforce this all-important right which doubtless will be denied to her? Surely we cannot be advocating for a right that will benefit only a minority of women, or persons.
Even if all these services were freely available, would the majority of women have the time, the facility, and/or the freedom to avail of them? Within the present family structure the woman and her daughters are quite literally trapped. Their duty and responsibility is ‘family first, the rest is secondary and can wait’. The message is drummed into them by society, by religion, by men, mothers and grandmothers. If the spouses divorce or the son becomes a delinquent, it is almost always the mother who is to blame, rarely the father. We long for women’s empowerment and make laws to achieve 30 per cent representation and more women in parliament – I don’t say we should not try, BUT I am certain that even if we came near to achieving these goals, the average woman will not be empowered if we do not address the very basis of her enslavement, the family structure. It was Frederich Engels who said, ‘Even before slavery existed, woman was the first slave’.
If we want women (and others) to exercise their rights to reproductive health, then we must socialise family duties and free women to be in total control of their lives and their bodies. Replacing the individual family system with a socially caring system is the way to go.
Human beings thrive in societies based on mutual care-giving. When we share the work, everyone has more free time. Just as when we share what we produce, everyone has access to what society has to offer. Collective care-giving is the child’s best protection. Any cucu will vouch for that. Surrounded by caregivers, no child would ever be trapped in a box with a needy or raging adult. And when raising children is a social responsibility, no-one will be forced to live with anyone else. Women will be able to control if, when and how they bear children. Socialised children coupled with reproductive control will free women to be the social equals of men. It will change relationships in ways we can only imagine.
The burden of childcare is overwhelming. The state, in order to ensure a steady flow of new workers, should fund infant and child care centres, collective kitchens and shared living arrangements. Our senior citizens and neighbourhood associations should be mobilised to assume some of these functions.
I am reminded at this point of those horrific pictures that we all saw a few months ago on our television screens. I am talking about the house maid in Uganda who brutalised the baby left in her care. We were all shocked for a few days, and then moved on. After all it was a private matter, sadly not even the women’s movement seems to have taken it up. But the mothers of young children had to. Those who could, have installed nanny cams, investigated their house maids and/or moved their babies to nurseries. Those who could not, and that is the majority, must be praying feverishly to God to protect their dear ones. To date we have not heard any concern expressed by the state, leave alone any action to solve this problem of childcare. Punishing the maid in a court of law is of no help to the myriad women who struggle with this predicament every day. And the maid, for all we know, may herself have been suffering under extreme family pressures.
I would like to conclude by saying that the issue of reproduction is the very basis of life and so, like food, shelter and education, reproductive health care has to be a fundamental right. But the issue of reproduction is also an integral part of the family structure and it cannot be divorced from it. So, as we work towards implementing this fundamental right, let us also raise awareness of the private and personal nature of the family in our present capitalist system, and the need to transform it into a social entity in our society, a new socialist society.
Delivered on March 16th 2015
Parklands Campus
Zarina Patel is the Secretary for Gender, SDP