KUALA LUMPUR: Every year, over 100 newborns are found abandoned in rivers, mosques, toilets and rubbish dumps in Malaysia. More than 60 per cent of them end up dead.
“I took the umbilical cord, and I cut it bit by bit with the nail clipper. It was quite tough, so I pulled it until it tore,” she recounted.She was later arrested and sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment for infanticide. She was the first person to receive that severe a sentence. “She lacked very basic knowledge about sexual intercourse. She didn’t understand it completely,” said her lawyer Ravin Singh, who managed to reduce her sentence to five years on appeal.
Ms Zarina Rie, who volunteers in Baitul Fiqh, a shelter for women and girls, believes it is a lack of religious knowledge that leads girls to have premarital sex. Most families would not accept what they perceive as “unclean babies”, noted social worker Zeeda Aziz, who has been helping unwed teenage mothers for six years now.
They’re being treated badly. I was there, and I was quite surprised how vulgar and how cruel the conversation was.“When I was struggling to get up to bathe … the nurse didn’t even bother to help. It was all because I was a single mother,” she recalled. “I lost all the energy to give birth … I just wanted to die.”These social prejudices and attitudes towards unwed mothers fuel the taboo on abortion, not to mention that getting an abortion is a challenge facing unwed women.
Finding a doctor willing to operate an abortion is also difficult. Even those who are willing to provide abortion services face pressure from their peers and bosses to withhold such services.
What an inappropriate photo to use! No one really needs that image in their heads!
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