In the last issue, I paid tribute to Marie Fleming who is in the last stages of multiple sclerosis and took to the courts to establish her right to assisted suicide,
since she cannot end her life on her own. Having fought a remarkable fight, she failed in the end. Interviewed in the Irish Times, her partner Tom Curran commented that when they went looking for permission for Marie to have a dignified and peaceful death, the State “spared no resource in denying her that… but they didn’t lift a finger to keep her alive” when she had a chest infection recently. She is imprisoned in a nightmare world from which the courts cut off release. Around the same time, a young Bangladeshi woman named Reshma Begum was imprisoned under the rubble of the Rana Plaza in Dhaka in Bangladesh with fading hopes of being rescued. Then, just as the site was to be razed, a policeman heard her tapping. Reshma Begum is a seamstress. She had
survived uninjured for 17 days since the building had collapsed, a manmade catastrophe that took the lives of over 1,000 of her impoverished co-workers. You may have worn clothes she made: the factory she worked in supplied Primark/Penneys.
The images of her release are extraordinary. But it is not hard to think of her utterly exploited working life before the collapse as another kind of imprisonment, and one about which no amount of tapping seems to alert the world. Again, at much the same time, other rescuers were breaking into a house in Cleveland, Ohio to rescue three young women who had, it transpired, been kidnapped as teenagers and held as prisoners and sex slaves for more than a decade by school bus driver Ariel Castro. One of the young women finally found a way to attract attention and end the horror. And in El Salvador, a country with a blanket ban on abortion, a young woman known as “Beatriz” is four months pregnant and has a disease called lupus which causes the body’s immune system to attack the body’s own cells and tissues. Her foetus is missing a large part of its brain and skull. Even if it survives the pregnancy, it will almost certainly die soon after. But Beatriz also is likely to die if she carries to term because the lupus has weakened her kidneys. So, she has challenged the country’s supreme court to decide if she could have an abortion to save her life. The El Salvador State backs her position, as do her doctors. But they are afraid to act because of the law. And, of course, powerful forces are aligned against her too. Indeed, it’s uncannily reminiscent of what happened to Savita Halappanavar in Ireland. The El Salvador Institute of Medicine says that as she is “clinically stable” … “there is no imminent risk of death.” Until it’s too late, you might say, and you’d be right.
And as I write this, an election campaign is concluding in Pakistan. There, women
candidates are contesting many seats despite death threats from the Taliban. Among them is the former film star Musarrat Shaheen. Where once she was a sex symbol famous for her risqué dancing, now she is a symbol of resistance… According to The Guardian, her defiance stems from the 1970s when she tried to work as a family planning adviser. Conservative mullahs told the people to beat her with a stick and had her sacked because she was unmarried. And that rings a bell as well. One could go on and on. What connects these stories is women’s resilience and indomitability in the face of desperate odds. Reshma Begum told rescuers that she had survived on biscuits retrieved from dead colleagues, dried food and rainwater. Amanda Berry and her fellow captives were almost skeletal when released. Of course, it’s great when someone is rescued and released from captivity. But it isn’t always about being rescued and living happily ever after. In some cases it’s about a bigger and more diffuse kind of release. And in Marie Fleming’s case it’s not about living, it’s really about dying. We might pride ourselves on having left the mullahs behind though, clearly, not yet far enough. They haven’t entirely gone away, you know. And isn’t it deeply troubling that change comes through women’s personal traumas rather than through reason?
The Irish courts and authorities are complacent about Marie Fleming’s situation
because they know she’s going to die at some point and as long as they have observed the letter of the law they’re in the clear. Likewise, they know that abortion is available in the UK and that allows them off the hook. Too often, all across the world women are denied freedoms that men take for granted.
Darkness is all around. Women have shown great bravery and fortitude in confronting oppression and ignorance. But the fight will never end, more’s the pity. Respect.