Killer mother had many choices!
She could have also used one of the facilities for family planning methods.
I am not a mother, but I am a parent, and I would imagine that giving birth and having children should be the best thing to happen to a woman. Most women live their whole lives without giving birth, not that they did not want to, but because they could not. This leads to them being depressed, leading to marriages falling apart and to some committing suicide.
I am also not a Psychiatrist nor a Psychologist, but I know of the above because I have reported on some, and I live in a community where these things have happened.
My heart bled this week when it was reported that a young mother took her last-born child, of a couple of months, to a dumping side and burned her after killing her in Sharpeville. It is said that the child was the 35-year-old’s mother’s sixth child and that she could not afford to maintain them, hence she took the ‘difficult’ decision of getting rid of her last born.
I am not one to judge (lest I be judged), but what the mother is alleged to have done deserves nothing but the harshest of punishments. I believe she had many choices before engaging in this horrible deed. First, as a democratic country, South Africa offers free health care, condoms are free and readily available for those with the urge to engage in sexual acts without protection.
She could have also used one of the facilities for family planning methods, she could have asked for assistance from the community, she could have asked the same assistance from family members and she could have given the child away for adoption.
She could have….
There are so many ‘she could haves’ that when I think of them my heart bleeds. I might not be in the young women’s shoes, but there are many options that she could have taken to avoid the route that she eventually took, that of killing the child in such a horrible and disgusting manner. It is clear from the above that there were options aplenty, and hers was just to choose one.
I swear, not all of them would have failed!
The community has called for her to be given the maximum sentence, some within the community have asked that she be given free bail so that they can also burn her, but their wish is that she should not die but suffer pain from the burn wounds, thereby feeling in a way, what the child felt. South Africa has lately been bursting to the seams with cases of child abuse and killings from men, fathers, and boyfriends but never in my wildest mind did I think that a mother would do such to her child. In a normal society the birth of a child brings happiness, it brings love, it further brings unity between families.
I have always believed that a mother is supposed to take care of her young, and never had I imagined that a mother would carry a child for nine months, painfully deliver the child, only for her to take it to a dumping site like rubbish and burn it, never!
I am not one to judge, but I believe that the killer mother had many choices and that there is absolutely no excuse for what she is alleged to have done.
She had many choices; she had many options!
Lerato wa ha Serero…
