My son,you are another year older. I love the far we have come. I wish you nothing but the best in life,true love, sufficient Grace,peace and wisdom to go through life…love mum.
#WorldEnvironmentDay
To my readers,today we got a guest writter. Enjoy…
“There is this privilege that men have, which we rarely talk about it. It is a social malady, pernicious to women and traumatizing to children. Men can choose to be parents, but women cannot. Society affords them that privilege. That is why men often readily accept fatherhood in their ‘official marriages.’ I say often, because some of them will still accuse their wives of making them raise other men’s children. Otherwise, these men will deny siring babies unless shamed, exposed, or proved wrong by a DNA test. You feel that for them, it does not count that they had sex with a woman and a conception is a reasonable, sometimes an inevitable consequence of that. What matters to them is whether they choose to accept responsibility. And most of the time they refuse. Because we live in a society where men hardly face the consequences of impregnating women. It is the women who face the consequences of getting pregnant.
Thusly, Kabi wa Jesus dared to shoot a #derixckjaxn video and condemn a woman he had indeed had sex with and impregnated, blamed the devil and others for testing their faith and marriage. It is because he knows fully the burden of proof lies with the woman. Also, the same applies to Prof Hamo for thinking it was okay to abandon his fatherly responsibilities towards his children and Jemutai. Consciously or not, these men use this privilege to determine which children they have sired they will acknowledge responsibility for. As a woman, when you get pregnant, you can’t hide from it, you can’t talk your way out of pregnancy or pray it away. I imagine that besides the challenges of being pregnant out of wedlock, women often have to fret about whether the men responsible will accept responsibility. That is simply unfair.
Men don’t have a public manifestation of their role in pregnancies. So, they capitalize on this. It is her word against his. Woe unto a woman who has no way of accessing the courts, or DNA, or other women who can help champion her plight, she plunges into single motherhood while the man responsible moves on to gain his dream life and marry the woman whose children he will parent. Worse, we blame these women for being single mothers because it never occurs to us to question the person who contributed to her single motherhood. I digress.
There is a toxic underlying narrative that these men rely on to evade responsibility. First, that women are liars, and second, that they are ‘sluts.’ A man may have sex with a woman, repeatedly, but have reservations on whether he is the father because women lie. Women only want to tie you down, or take your money. Since their money is more important to them than the plight of the children, they sire or the women whose lives they ruin, they will want proof. They make women go get DNA tests knowing full well they were banging all night long seven days a week. For others, women are sluts. Believing at any point, women are sleeping with multiple partners, and somehow that’s grounds for discrediting what a woman says. Most times it is a combination of both these narratives.
It is this same privilege that has governments and religious institutions planning laws that regulate women’s bodies. Politics, laws, debate, and everything else around abortion and unwanted pregnancies center on the woman and what she should or shouldn’t do after the fact. It baffles me that all these ‘intellectuals’ in parliaments have never stopped to consider that pregnancies do not happen in a vacuum. Except, they know but they aim to provide institutions that absolve men of responsibility while punishing women for the same things. Hence, no constitution ever provides for men’s responsibility in unwanted pregnancies, but some of the so-called ‘progressive’ constitutions will put caveats for women on when they can legally have abortions. Many talk of life starting at conception as if conception is a process that women telepathically induce in their wombs. However, if we are going to be non-discriminatory about abortion, then the conversation needs to start from the source. There must be provisions that hold men accountable for their roles in the occurrence of pregnancies, particularly in cases of unwanted pregnancies.
For as long as men can choose to be parents and women can’t, we will continue to see men come out and condemn women for ruining their names, careers, and ‘testing their faith’ despite intimate involvement with the women. We will continue to witness women showing up with children at their burials because when they were alive they chose not to be parents to those children. Single motherhood will continue to be met with derision instead of admiration. We will continue to have a society that polices women’s sexual behavior under the guise of ‘morality’ while allowing men’s sexual behavior to carry on untrammeled. Ultimately, we will continue to have society as is now, where men have sex for fun and women bear the rest of the burdens of sex, including children.” Ruzuna Akoth
.am free years old
waFrancis 