Eternal issues of women

by Padma Edirisinghe

As to where Camp Bastion is, only gods know, but now I know a lot about it via my readings. Poor boy! His mother says that she did not know that he was within her. So, may be due to that, he had come out months earlier and is now a Bonnie blue boy. The mother is a Fiji born gunner in the Royal Artillery of the UK Armed forces.

Popular gossip is that she had lied to circumvent the law prevailing that no pregnant woman should be employed on overseas operations but she denies her knowledge of the pregnancy stoutly. Now a system has begun to screen all service women before employment. Mind you, all this I read.

So, the UK Armed Forces are learning things only now. But decades ago in the 1960s the bosses of the two female teachers’ colleges sited on either side of the Mahaweli banks had employed screening tests. That is by way of directly asking whether the new trainees are married or single or pregnant. It was an unholy thing to ask unmarried women of the conservative up country whether they are pregnant but it was the practice. The unfairness of never having the private lives of male applicants pried this way just glares. If the female applicants both married and unmarried say no, they would be taken in and if they lie and later the pregnancy becomes obvious, they are asked to leave and allowed to join again only a year later. A sort of demotion. That is with regard to the married ones. In the case of the unmarried ones who lie and found out later the vice squad takes over and they are nearly guillotined legally and socially.

During the 1960s many have recourse to abortions that sometimes go awry even endangering the life of the mother. The husband contributes to the baby slaughter usually done by bogus medical practitioners in the villages. The Endaru stick is their chief surgical instrument.

Soon the impropriety of asking the all important question from unmarried young girls was realised and it was limited only to the married ones till an unmarried trainee actually got pregnant and the system reverted.

Back to Camp Bastion. Fortunately, for the Camp Bastion mother job gunner not teacher, if one were to believe her she had not definitely detected her own pregnancy. She had felt nauseous her periods had stopped and she asserts that all that was due to the stress of serving in Afghanistan. There is no mention of a husband and just like performing the miracle of carrying a bouncing baby inside without knowing that it was there she may claim that no man had a share in the production of life.

Much more than the mothers, the children are at the mercy or viciousness of others actions. Their lives could be cut short for the causes of the parents.

“A child I can always have later. But the course I cannot miss”, a teacher trainee would argue with her husband.

“The course you can join later but you may not have a child again”.
Or the argument could be other way around.
“Just abort the boy and finish off”, the husband would say.

“I cannot do anything so cruel. I pleaded with you to be careful and now see the situation we are in”.

Finally, the baby pays with his or her life and the mother is driven to an unhappy life forever. This pathetic situation in female Tcs was ended by a female Director Dr. T. Kariyawasam by giving six months maternity leave to students.

I am not sure what the reforms would be at Camp Bastion but reading it in October, 44 years later I was reminded of the scene in the sick room of the female TC I served in as an amateur lecturer in the late 1968 (heading the college later) when I myself was carrying my last child. There was a doctor, a midwife and police men too hovering in the verandah. There was a blood sodden cloth into which were dropped pieces of a new life. An elderly woman, probably her mother, was wailing outside. Once her pretty ambitious daughter had wanted to go to the moon. “Oh, My baby. Is this the way you went to the moon? “she wailed beating her breasts.

Never would such a drama take place in a male Teachers’ College. That is why women need delicate treatment. Their lives are often bound with another sprouting life and like fragile china they need careful handling.