Childless by choice

A short while back, the national news headlines were ablaze with a story about a woman in Naivasha who had committed suicide due to her inability to conceive. According to neighbours, the woman had tried to conceive for years, to no avail, and her fellow women had taunted her for it. Tragically, her husband came home one day from work to find her body hanging from the ceiling.

That the inability to bear a child is devastating for many women is hardly a surprise. Many a woman — a good case in point being the highly esteemed High Court Judge Roselyn Nambuye, whose story ran in this newspaper recently — has suffered ridicule and rejection from their spouses and in-laws because of their inability to bear children.