When you read such reports, your heart does not only increases its beats, but as a reasonable person, you are compelled to ask yourself; what sort of cockroaches do we have in authority in some of our Ghanaian institutions?
When I studied for my first degree in London, I had not less than 4 pregnant women in my year group each year—-one of my good friends even had a child right before we completed Law School. These were young students, with ages ranging from 19-26.
At my postgraduate university, the story was the same, except that I even had several mothers at the Law School and interestingly, the universities (both undergraduate and postgraduate level) went the beyond ordinary to accommodate the needs of the mothers and pregnant women so that the lives they had chosen did not serve as a bulwark to their education and empowerment.
All around the world, women are directly and indirectly oppressed and discriminated against, and they are forced to reside at the bottom of the conversation.
I always tell people that, women struggling for equality or feminism does not necessary mean women want to be like men, but it mainly means they want their needs to be rightfully accommodated, be treated fairly as men would be treated and have their own female needs well documented and taken into special consideration.
The struggles of women are mostly different from men and it’s such struggles that the existing patriarchy ignores, entrenches or make worse—despite the over flow of laws that seek to elevate women.
A woman must have children, be a wife and be educated; yet in a 21st century Ghana, “3 female students of the Nurses and Midwifery Training School, Mampong, Ashanti have been denied opportunity to register and write their licensing Exams with the Nurses and Midwifery Council on grounds that they are pregnant,” reports Atinka Fm.
It’s offensive and an indictment on all of us that such a thing has even taken place in Ghana—-in view of the global call for women empowerment, through education and independence.
And the shocking part is, these women are not even young girls where you could offensively argue that they are students and have no business getting pregnant. One of them is a married woman of 35 years.
“One of the denied students, 35-year-old Madam Alice Armoh, a married woman, described the decision to bar them from writing the exams as very discriminatory. She said all attempts her and her colleagues registered have proved futile,” the report said.
Does this not send a chill down your spine? We don’t even have to go into Law—-this is so wrong and unjust that even if there were now laws against this, it would be deemed wrong by most reasonable people.
Ghana’s domestic laws prohibit discrimination; and discrimination based on gender or pregnancy or marriage is globally outlawed by the various Human Rights instruments.
Women’s rights were so much plodded on that the UN Convention on the Elimination of  All Forms of Discrimination Against Women was specifically adopted in 1979, to deal with things like the issue at hand but even in 2016, Ghanaian women are being denied a right to obtain a certificate by virtue of the fact that they are pregnant or women.
These are human beings and not dogs; what sort of insensitive and backward people do we have making such absurd decisions?
If this was anywhere in the West that I have seen, special provisions would rather be made for the pregnant women—-so that they could write their exams comfortably and at peace.
This is absolutely illegal and the women must be allowed to quickly register—-the Ministry of Health and the Nurses and Midwifery Council must shamefully step in to ensure that the human rights of these hard working women are duly respected.
And they deserve not only an apology but some sort of compensation for the denial and the unhealthy emotional consequence.