Northern women face divorce, trauma for receiving treatment from male doctors
If it were not for the timely intervention of the elderly Islamic cleric at Kizara Village in Tsafe Local Government Area of Zamfara State, Garba Umar would have ended his 15-year-old marriage to his wife, Halima. Her offence was allowing a male doctor attend to her in the labour room.
Sadly, such an experience is not new, neither is it exclusive to Halima.The same fate befell Hafsat, a resident of Talata Mafara in Zamfara State, in which case her husband warned that on no account should she seek medical attention from a male doctor in his absence, no matter the gravity of the ailment.
The vicissitudes of life would, however, compel Hafsat to flout the instruction. Like Hafisat, she was delivered of a baby girl by a male doctor when the husband was unavailable. It took the intervention of family and friends that the marriage didn’t end in a divorce.
Unlike Halima and Hafsat, who were both lucky to have their marriages intact despite flouting the ‘golden rule’ set by their husbands, a 14-year-old mother in Zango Local Government Area of Katsina State, Aminat Mukhtar, wasn’t as lucky. Hers ended in a divorce despite aborting her education because of the marriage.
She said her husband divorced her for allowing a male doctor attend to her when she had complications during childbirth. Sadly, she had a stillbirth. Thus, she lost the baby and her marriage.
Mukhtar, who was a JSS 3 student at a government secondary school in 2022, said she was out of school for a year due to the development, noting that her suitor pressured her for the marriage, a situation that made her drop out of school for one year before the outcome of the short-lived marriage compelled her to return to school.
“‘I was initially attending school here (Government Girls Secondary School, Baure) when I met a man who said he wanted to marry me. He promised me several things and lured me to drop out of school. After I left school, I kept on seeing my schoolmates, and they told me that some programmes were being implemented at the school to assist students who were from poor homes like me. I made inquiries and confirmed that it was true.
As heartbreaking as these are, such cases are prevalent in some northern states like Katsina, Kano, Sokoto, Bauchi, Zamfara, Kebbi, Jigawa, and others.
Culled from Punch News