But the woman’s family are insisting that the militiamen will continue to occupy the hospital until they are compensated for the removal of her womb.

The family is demanding 50 camels, which is the traditional Somali compensation offered for the death of a woman.

The woman’s family say she is as good as dead because she can no longer bear children.

This has been bothering me all day. I realize that this woman comes from a traditional culture, in a place where survival is everything. She would have died had a doctor at a free clinic in Mogadishu not removed her uterus. She was carrying a dead fetus, and with the lack of medical care in Somalia, she was probably in extremis when she finally got to the hospital. So the doctor removed her womb, and then waited to be thanked for saving her life.

Only, it seems that in the views of her family and many traditional elders, she’s already dead anyway, because she is now incapable of bearing children.

So now, in lawless Somalia, other people are going without medical treatment and many may die because the woman’s family and the gunmen they hired are convinced that they’re owed a blood debt by the doctor that saved their kinswoman’s life.

Yes, yes, as a “rich” selfish childfree Western woman, I see that my choice was not hers. Having children in her society confers status (no matter how I may cluck disapprovingly, I do know this) and can bring prosperity or at least survival. You have to have enough young people in your village or clan to do essential work raising crops and protecting stock from predators (and from hungry groups of militiamen).

It’s a simpler society. Life is lived closer to the edge of survival there, and choosing when or if to have children is often not an option (especially thanks to our government’s aid policies). Women get pregnant; they either give birth or die. Some choice.

All of which makes me feel really, really lucky to be able to choose to be childfree.

But even if I weren’t childfree, I’d still be a feminist… and I’m horrified that the equation in this story seems to work out to “woman=uterus” and nothing more.

However, the bigger problem is that Somalia is currently a failed state, and the rest of the world (meaning the US and the UN and a lot of NGOs and so on) seems not to be able to do anything about it, or care very much. We suffered terrible losses there, and left Somalia to its agonies. So now stories like this are going to be more and more common… if the international news people still care enough to report them. However, it’ll probably be just the most bizarre stories that will get any press, like the tale of a woman without a womb who’s now as good as dead to her family.

That doesn’t seem right to me.