India, thousands of women had their womb removed. Why? “They work harder without menstruation”
The Indian sub-continent shows its most atrocious contradictions on the body and fate of women. At the same latitudes, there are women reduced to outsourced uteri to produce other people's children and very poor women to tear their womb because menstruation slows work.
Menstruation in many areas of India is still considered a real taboo and women on their bleeding days are turned away from social life because they are considered unclean.
But the most extreme aversion to the menstrual cycle and its usually acceptable drawbacks, which would then be an integral part of an admirable order that involves our whole body and psyche, is seen in the spread of practice as shameful as it is impunity act, even if there are attempts to stem it.
Women who work on sugar cane plantations must not and / or cannot miss even a day of work, which the annoyances or ailments related to menstruation can sometimes imply. Better to solve the problem at the root, therefore the choice is between getting rid of the uterus or away from work in the fields.
The atrocious news comes from the western state of Maharashtra, where it has been revealed by the Indian media that thousands of young women have undergone surgical procedures to remove their wombs in the past three years. In a substantial number of cases, they have done this so they can get work as sugarcane harvesters.
Women are not appreciated as a workforce because they have less force and because they have that annoying peculiarity that compromises their performance as "knives" of sugar. The comparison is drawn also in the West, where the aim is to make menstruation on a woman's life to seem completely irrelevant. From the parachute to jump in the air and go, from the legendary 90s to the new super-comfortable materials thanks to which you don't have to notice that you are bleeding, to the white pants that I can never wear right there in those days, if I want to. You have to be a woman, but it doesn't have to weight, clear? A mentality on the border between misogyny and paedophilia. The cycle remembers the time and means the possibility of life and these strange and ungovernable facts do not serve trade. Unless they become products themselves. India is one of the largest "discount stores" of the rented uterus, although now the government has imposed restrictions on surrogate pregnancies for commercial purposes.
But going back to the real atrocities that affect thousands of women identical to us in value and far from our condition for the enormous weights that still weigh on them, let's read what it means to be born female in India.
Every year, tens of thousands of poor families from Beed, Osmanabad, Sangli and Solapur districts migrate to more affluent western districts of the state - known as "the sugar belt" - to work for six months as "cutters" in sugarcane fields.
Once there, they are at the mercy of greedy contractors who use every opportunity to exploit them.
To begin with, they are reluctant to hire women because cane-cutting is hard work and women may miss a day or two of work during their periods. If they do miss a day of work, they have to pay a penalty fee.
In some places in the world (from Pakistan, Bangladesh, to India), it is a custom to flush out girls as soon as fetal development betrays their sex, for abortion purposes. If they are born, they can be killed or left to die; if they live, they can end up in child prostitution or kidnapped, raped and, killed.
The reasons are many and firmly intertwined with poverty, the lack of education and means. Yet, selective abortion for dissatisfaction with the sex of the dying person also exists here. Any reason to have an abortion is a good reason, isn't it? I was reading this morning about a new trend in the extreme sex sector: conceiving to abort, not without first having experienced the pleasant, alternative sex during pregnancy.
"Every reason to have an abortion is a valid reason," said Colleen McNicholas, director of Planned Parenthood in the St. Louis region, referring to sex-selective abortion or eugenic abortion.
But some even make abortion fun: the latest kinky fashion (where according to Wikipedia we mean "unconventional sexual practices") is to conceive a child and then have an abortion. A testimony: "My girlfriend loves to be pregnant and likes abortion". He enjoys those pregnancies that last more or less 20 weeks: "She has no menstruation and is sexually very active." In the past ten years, they have aborted seven times.”
Another news concerns another treatment imposed on women workers this time within the textile field, to whom real drugs are administered with macroscopic and harmful side effects, always to avoid the "nuisances" of menstruation.
In the southern state of Tamil Nadu, women working in the multi-billion dollar garment industry allege that they have been given unlabelled drugs at work - instead of a day off - when they have complained of their period pain.
According to a Thomson Reuters Foundation expose, based on interviews with about 100 women, the drugs were rarely provided by medical professionals and the seamstresses, mostly from poor disadvantaged families, said they couldn't afford to lose a day's wages on account of period pains.
All of the 100 women who were interviewed said they had received drugs, and more than half said that as a result, their health had suffered.
Women who are simply means of a frenzied production, the same that brings low cost, but so cool, clothes to our distant homes.
Isn't it tragic and grotesque to see what "expanding women's participation in the labour market" means in the crude reality when the labour market is the most ferocious, torn and anti-human that we have managed to produce in centuries of civilization?
Comments