For many years, many Nigerian women have suffered abuse from inlaws, society, relatives, etc for these reasons below:
- Not being able to have a child or children,
- or not having a particular sex of a child.
I think it is so unfair to judge a woman by her inability to have a child.
To start with, a woman is not the only one responsible for having a child in a marriage relationship.
I know of many cases where the man is impotent, yet the woman is held responsible for not producing babies in that union. In a lot of these cases where the men are impotent, they keep their families in the dark concerning their situation, even their wives do not know they are impotent, they keep the information to themselves, they refuse to go to the hospital for checks, and the woman receives all the insults from society on behalf of the couple, yet the problem is not originating from her.
Now to the issue of sex of the child, my biology taught me that the Y chromosome comes from the man. He is the one who should be held responsible for the absence of male children in his home, rather the blame continues to come on the woman. In most of these homes, the inlaws push them man to get a new wife, the man starts sleeping around and trying his luck with other women, the woman is badly treated and made to feel like a witch who has refused to continue the family name by not producing a male child.
Please dear man, next time your family members start having the meeting concerning your wife and her inability to produce a male child or any child at all, please let them know you are the one delaying the baby from coming as you are yet to supply her with the material to produce the male child.
Finally to inlaws who will not allow couples to thrive in their new home, who feel so entitled to the decisions that couples have to make;
It is only in Africa where I see so much interference from inlaws to the point that marriages break apart because of them. I think we need to groom ourselves to know where to draw the lines from inlaw interference if we truly want to remain married.
