All hope is not lost when a couple is childless
Babies. When you look at the sea of people during political rallies, sit in traffic for three hours because there are just too many people with cars these days, when every sunday the pastor is baptizing a child; you would be within reason to assume that child-bearing is a very common thing. But, is it? Ask a group of garrulous market women in any town or village, ask a group of housewives in any estate, ask any pastor about the ‘God give us a child’ prayer requests he gets on a weekly basis, ask any marriage counsellor how many homes are wintry because there is no child, ask any fertility doctor the number of times they have been told to ‘do all they can’; there are people who are looking for babies everywhere. Babies they are yet to have. Babies they probably will never have.
At one IVF centre in Nairobi, the Sunday confidentially spoke to a 37-year-old woman who was on her first visit. She was looking at her options for child bearing, now that her marriage of six years has not been blessed with a baby. And she was alone. “I can’t come here with my husband. He doesn’t know that I am here and he will never know. I am desperate for a child,” she said.
They have been married since she was 31 years old and she plans on keeping the marriage alive. But lack of children tends to disrupt or destroy marriages. “We’ve tried everything in the last five years. The pressure has been building up slowly, from him and his family members. We went to a fertility clinic in April this year and it turned out that while I was very fine and able to bear children, he wasn’t. Our doctor told him to go for a second round of tests, and then to seek a second opinion from another doctor but he flipped out, refused to go for the second round of tests and has not seen another doctor.”
This woman’s husband is not different from most men. Naitore Nyamu Mathenge, a project officer at Equality Now has witnessed this exact scenario many times. “Men hardly talk about their inability to have children. In fact, this is a taboo topic. It is assumed that the inability to bear children is a woman’s problem. Curiously, women frequently try and cover up their husband’s inability to bear children. It is a fact that failure to bear children can take a huge toll on men and on the marriage; what is not true is the perception that men who can’t bear children are inadequate,” she says.
When it is confirmed that a woman can’t bear children in marriage, or when it is believed that she can’t bear children, the options for the husband are often very clear: Adopt. Remain child-less. Marry a second, child-bearing wife. Divorce your wife (not legal) and re-marry. Impregnate a mistress and put her up in Munyonyo, Kampala or in south B, Nairobi.
But what avenues of redress are open to women? What options do they have when it is the man who can’t bear children? What healthy and safe options do they have in a patriarchal society like Kenya where making a marriage work is seen as the ‘duty’ of the woman? Consultant Psychiatrist Dr Catherine Syengo Mutisya says that ideally, marriage is for better or for worse.
The inability of a man to bear children, just like the inability of a woman to bear children, definitely falls into the ‘for worse’ category. “If the man can’t bear children, and possible medical options have been exhausted, and the woman still wants to keep the marriage, then the couple can decide to adopt children. Or, they can choose to stay without children if they are both in agreement.
The important thing is that the couple should protect each other, the public doesn’t need to know where the problem is.” The first two options are to adopt or stay married but childless. Option three is to have children by another man and lie to your husband that he is the father of the children. Many of the women who do this do it out of love and a need to protect their husbands. It is done mostly by women whose husbands have not gotten conclusive medical confirmation of their condition or those whose husbands live in denial after being confirmed to be infertile; the women pursue this line cautiously and secretly.
Just like the woman at the IVF centre, they find a sperm donor (a living, breathing one), conceive a child and save their marriage. This is not the wisest move to make given the deception involved. Women can also seek legal redress in the event that their husbands cannot sire children. Advocate Beryl Anyango explains. “Section 66 (2) of the Marriage Act (2014) provides the following as grounds for divorce; adultery, cruelty, depravity, desertion by a spouse for at least three years and the irretrievable breakdown of a marriage. Infertility on its own is not grounds for divorce. But with infertility often comes cruelty. A woman can file for divorce either on grounds of cruelty or irretrievable break down of the marriage, where both may have been caused by her husband’s infertility.”
Interestingly, not many women go for the legal option. Not because the courts (in civil marriages), houses of worship (in religious marriages) or elders (in customary marriages) prefer reconciliation to dissolution as a solution to marital problems, but because of the society and the burden it has placed on women with regard to marriage.
“Basically, according to societal norms, it is supposedly justified and expected for a man to re-marry if the woman cannot have children, but if the man cannot have children, the woman ought to be a “good” wife and stand by her husband, the abuse and ridicule notwithstanding,” Naitore says.
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