so goes a heading in the times of India today….here’s the link: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1098622.cms
Sheer example of women power, I’d say. So this reinstates my belief that there are cases of men being harassed also. And I also know that there are many such cases that go unreported, of uncooperating wives, nagging wives, wives who think they are smarter and try to look down upon their husbands, sometimes even embarrasing them in public. In countries like the US, husbands are also entitled by the law to file harassment cases against their wives…but do we have such provsions in India?
Then there is this another interesting story : http://epaperdaily.timesofindia.com/Default/Client.asp?
Daily=CAP&Enter=true&Skin=TOI&GZ=T&AW=1115266656218
where a man is asking the court to prevent his wife from having an abortion. This is a really complicated set of questions out here.
1. Does a woman have the absolute right to abort a child, without the consent of her husband?
2. Does the court have enough authority to prevent a woman from aborting, on request from her husband?
3. Even if the woman is stopped from aborting the child, will she also not have the right to ever visit or see that child(considering that she never wanted the kid in the first place)?
4. Can a man be given the full responsibility of raising the kid alone(considering that the mother is needed during the first few months)?
The funniest part in this entire episode is the reason for the couple’s seperation. In the husband’s words: “Upon her return she began to have bouts of homesickness and said she could not bear the thought of spending the rest of her life here,”…homesickness after marriage?? Another debatable issue…
Can homesickness be a ground for divorce? Does marrying a man who lives in another state not mean agreeing to live with him far from your home??
Lets see how these two cases turn up in the future!
men can be harrassed by women.
and there r not even rape laws for men (http://o3.indiatimes.com/coffee )
and its not easy for men to complain aobut domestic abuse either.
i think men’s rights cannot infringe on women’s reprodcutive rights.
and home sickness, well it depends on the situation, and i dont like to comment too much on individual cases.
WD.. agreed on that one totally,
men’s rights can definitely not infringe on women’s reproductive rights…
However, the question involved is: there were two parties originally involved (okay my language is a bit bland) in the act leading to the baby, and now one wants to abandon it, but the other doesn’t want to, then?
Does bearing a baby in her womb give a woman total rights of the baby? Does the father have no ownership of the baby? If it was this simple, then I guess there wouldn’t be any quarrels over who gets to keep the kids in case of a seperation?
this is just my personal opinion and i dont want to impose it on anyone or assume moral highground.
i think no one including the father, should have the right to interfer with women’s reproductive rights before birth of the child.
as a person who has had miscarriage too, let me tell, even an abortion is no ordinary thing (and unsafe abortions are cause of many many deaths in India)
so whether she wants to keep the child, abort the child etc, should be her choice.
but when it comes to rights and responsibilites after birth, it should be generally shared and would vary depending on the competencey of the parent.
there can be bad mothers and there can be bad fathers. and i dont want to say only one gender will be better.
btw in case u didnt know,
A married woman is NOT the natural guardian of her child but an unmarried woman is the guardian of her child.The father’s endorsement on every document is still mandatory in schools, colleges, banks, employment matters, domicile and travel documents, licences and all other official identity papers needed by an individual.
And if there is a divorce, the father can still remain the guardian. Geetha Hariharan, a divorcee, had to go to Supreme Court in 1995 when the Reserve Bank of India refused to allow her to sign the documents necessary for investment bonds for her minor son.
Though more than a decade ago in 1989, the Law Commission in its 135th Report recommended that both the mother and father be declared natural guardians with equal rights over the child, this is yet to be implemented. A step in this direction is the Tamilnadu government order making it mandatory for schools to list the mother as joint or sole guardian of the child.
http://www.infochangeindia.org/features96.jsp
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i agree there r 2 parties involved, but in our country marital rape is not a crime, and there is no such thing as right to safe sex.
as far as I remember, some while ago there was a legislation that gave a mother equal rights as her father, and in most schools (cbse ones), its either the mother/father/both whose names have togo on each document.
Let me try to make a thing clear, I am myself a supporter of women’s rights, including reproductive rights before birth, the right to say no to sex (even to her husband), and the right to a better life.
And I disagree with you in saying that a woman has complete right to abort her child, if she agreed to having it in the first place(if it was without her approval then its ok to abort it, she has full right). Agreed that its the woman who bears the child and thus shares a very special bond with the child, the fathers’ importance must not be forgotten. I have seen many quarrels where the woman says “i took all the pain to give birth to this child , you have no right on it”…think of what the man feels at that time.
It hurts…because maybe a physical bond is not shared between a father and his child, but the emotional one can’t be denied.
well i gave u the link, u can check on the guardianship.
and just signin the name is not the same as being the legal guardian.
well its my personal opinion, women has right to her body and what she does with her body.
but after birth. its equal rights. after all if ther was a surrogate mother involved we wouldnt say, she has all the rights, just because she deliverd the baby would we.
Agreed that a woman has a right to her body, but does she have a right to another life? Or rather, to take a life that’s in her but not her own.
Here i’d like to clarify that I’m not totally against abortion, and it becomes necessary in certain cases, but in a case when a father is prepared to take care of the child after it is born, aborting it is wrong. Legally, I don’t know, but morally I do feel it is very wrong.!!
well she still has to be the one who has to bear the child. and there is also question of being with the child atleast for the first few months atleast.
childbearin is not just physical thing its also very emotinal.
all this just personal opinion, of course,
worse is the case when in India every 5 minutes a woman dies due to childbirth. India has a poor maternal mortality rate in the world. and sad, that every 5 minutes for a mother , motherhood isnt about life, but about death:(
(hopefully i havent distracted from the issue, but just wanted to create awareness on it also so wrote)