JULY 17 — The recent case of a 31-year-old unmarried woman who allegedly chopped the corpse of her stillborn into eight pieces shows yet again the failure of Malaysia’s abstinence-based reproductive health policies that are driven by morality and religious beliefs.
The woman was vilified in the news, including in ultra-conservative news portal ismaweb.net, which conveniently left out the fact that the baby was already dead before it was dismembered, and is now under investigation under Section 318 of the Penal Code for concealing the birth of a child. The offence is punishable with two years’ jail.
That law is utterly sexist as it is women who get pregnant and who have to bear the social (and legal) consequences of having children out of wedlock.
We get enraged at women for dumping their babies, yet we allow a system that encourages unwanted pregnancies by teaching abstinence instead of safe sex in schools, by refusing contraception to unmarried couples at government hospitals and clinics, and by making abortion illegal.
Abstinence advocates blame unwanted pregnancies and baby dumping on horny couples who can’t wait till marriage to get it on. Their solution is more religious or abstinence-based sex education. And if that fails, they shrug and go on to condemn the woman for being such a slut and getting pregnant.
Let’s face it — we can’t (and shouldn’t) stop people from having sex and doing what they want with their bodies. So the next best thing is to prevent the undesirable consequences of (unsafe) sex—sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies and baby dumping.
It’s incredibly selfish to promote ineffective policies like abstinence-based sex education for the sake of your personal religious beliefs or moral convictions, and then wash your hands off when people choose to have sex anyway and risk burdening the State with unwanted pregnancies because of their ignorance.
We expend police resources to hunt down women who abandon their babies or who get abortions, while the ones who aren’t dumped end up in public orphanages. Or the children may be raised by single mothers and get sucked into the cycle of poverty and crime. All this costs the State, not to mention the psychological costs to the mothers and unwanted children.
What does it cost the State when people have safe sex before marriage and don’t end up getting pregnant? Nothing. Perhaps their souls (to the religious folk), but then, that’s between them and God, isn’t it? I don’t think anyone can say with certainty that people who have premarital sex will go to hell.
Furthermore, a US study has shown that teenagers who receive sex education are more likely to delay their first sexual encounter and also to use contraception when they do end up doing it. LiveScience reported researchers from The Guttmacher Institute as saying that there’s no evidence that sex education encourages teenagers to have sex earlier, or to take more sexual risks.
Saying that people should only have sex after they get married also doesn’t make sense.
If religious folk are really concerned about monogamy, then why do churches remarry people who’ve been divorced? Their logic is iffy. Is it more sinful for a man to only have sex with one woman (without ever getting married to her) throughout his life, or for a man to have sex with more than one woman after remarrying several times?
Islam has a funny kind of logic too when it comes to sex. The religion also prohibits premarital sex, made doubly worse as it’s criminalised in Malaysia for Muslims. Muslim men can marry girls who are way younger than them, below the age of 16, with permission from the Shariah Court. The Star reported that the Shariah Courts approved 1,022 out of 1,165 applications in 2012 for child marriage, where the bride was underage in most of the cases.
Sex, love and marriage are completely separate.
You can have sex with someone for fun without necessarily being in love with them (hello Tinder). You can have sex with one partner in a loving, monogamous relationship outside marriage, or even with two or more in a loving, polyamorous relationship (not to be confused with swinging). You can even be asexual and be completely disinterested in sex.
The 31-year-old woman who allegedly dismembered her baby reportedly has a boyfriend.
Asking why she didn’t wait till marriage to have sex is the wrong question. Perhaps she’s not interested in getting married or having children at all. Women who want to focus on their career can do it easier by remaining child-free. And if you don’t want children, why get married?
Marriage brings with it a whole host of responsibilities and obligations. If you don’t want children, it doesn’t make sense to get married just to have sex. You want sex and have them gone by breakfast; you don’t want to have to wash your partner’s dirty dishes or see their clothes all over the place.
Or you’re fine living together in a committed relationship, but you see no reason to get married because you don’t want to go through a lengthy legal process should you break up. Or risk losing your assets in a messy divorce.
Saying that you must wait till marriage to have sex also comes with the complication of getting someone to marry you in the first place. If you’re a woman, you’ll have to wait for someone to propose to you. Yes, it’s the 21st century, but people still generally expect men to do the proposing. And if you’re a man, you’ll have to get the woman to agree to marry you.
It’s a lot easier to get someone to agree to sex than marriage.
Maybe that 31-year-old woman’s boyfriend didn’t want to marry her yet, if ever. What’s a woman to do then? Lifelong abstinence is only for priests and nuns.
We should enable women to be independent. Not force them into the institution of marriage if they want to have sex, where they lose their rights as marital rape is still not recognised and a wife’s domicile is dependent on her spouse’s under civil family law.
We need to start preventing unwanted pregnancies, not premarital sex. And allow women access to birth control at government hospitals and clinics.
The Pill heralded women’s lib in the US. It’s time we had it here, too.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
