Man punches nurse for removing wife's burqa during c-section

[ellisonz]

79. Why it took so long for someone to point out this key point is beyond me...

"He said seeing his wife's veil lifted in front of a male health worker was like seeing her "bare-chested" in front of another man."

It appears to me the issue was the presence of a "male health worker," my guess is that there was a cultural communication breakdown. I doubt he would have had any issue if the doctor and nursing staff was all female. The amount of ignorance of certain Islamic cultures in this thread astounds me - how do you think women gave birth in Afghanistan under the Taliban or before modern medicine?

Let's explore this issue a bit more:

About 18,000 Afghan women die during childbirth every year, says the Afghan Health Ministry. According to a recent report by the NGO Save the Children, Afghanistan ranked as the worst place to give birth, followed by Niger and Chad. In these countries, 60% of all births are not attended to by skilled health professionals. On average, about 1 in 23 mothers are expected to die from pregnancy-related causes. Children also die young and suffer from malnutrition, and education for girls is poor.

Often the challenge is just getting women to hospitals. Rural Afghans, even in relatively progressive provinces like Bamiyan in central Afghanistan, are suspicious or dismissive of doctors. In the town of Bamiyan, the main hospital has a new maternity ward. But head midwife Sediqa Hosseini says many of the 25 beds in the ward are often empty. On a recent summer afternoon, Hosseini, a tiny, serious woman in a baby blue headscarf, greets the 12 women who have checked in. One is Fatima, a 25-year-old farmer's wife. "When Fatima arrived, her baby was coming out shoulder first," Hosseini says. "She had to have a C-section. Without help, both of them would have died."

Fatima says her husband took her to the hospital when her labor became so painful that she was doubled over. Hosseini says few husbands would have done the same. Many rural men prefer to pray with a mullah to cure illnesses, she says. "They believe this is more reliable than medicine." As she breast-feeds her newborn daughter, Fatima says she wouldn't have gone if it had not been for a community-health worker who told her hospitals are safe and free.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2094031,00.html#ixzz1jQVebsfP

Afghanistan has an atrocious infant mortality rate because it does not have enough trained female mid-wives and social workers who are capable of doing this type of work. I refuse to believe that the only acceptable approach on our part is to impose a Westernized hospital model where it is not wanted. What is needed is a team approach. Trained local/culturally sensitive teams of social workers, mid-wives, nurses, doctors, and religious officials. I refuse to believe that under proper conditions that Islamic men and women with belief with this type of belief system can not be persuaded to do the smart thing in regards to child birth, and in fact, treatment of women and children in general. I think we do a great disservice to ourselves when we persist with the notion that somehow ipso facto other people are fundamentally different than us in their basic humanity. As Nobel Peace Prize winner described, "How can you defy fear? Fear is a human instinct, just like hunger. Whether you like it or not, you become hungry. Similarly with fear. But I have learned to train myself to live with this fear." We must all train ourselves, simply throwing our hands up in the air and saying what a fool, or how could anything like this ever happen, we must with reasoned mind, approach the problem and solve it together, as one, a common race, human kind.

The condition of women in Islamic societies as a whole is also far from desirable. However, we should acknowledge that there are differences. In certain countries, the conditions are much better and in others much worse.

Women are the victims of this patriarchal culture, but they are also its carriers. Let us keep in mind that every oppressive man was raised in the confines of his mother's home.
Shirin Ebadi