Free Mya

10: A "spacewife" marries again

Another Wedding

by Alison

Reader, she married him!

Amber is reading over my shoulder and saying, "But Mum, they know that. That is the one thing that they do know for sure. That's about the one fact the media did get right!"

I am sorry. I am getting ahead of myself. The importance of holding another wedding ceremony was explained to Daniel.

"Unless the Ministry is convinced that she is married, Mya is legally obliged to see the film about terminations," said a plump bureaucrat from the Ministry's Questionable Status Department.

She was pale, with jet black hair and quite heavy black eyeliner. Daniel wondered if she were a Goth when she was off-duty. Surely not? Her lipstick was pale pink.

He stopped staring at her and started processing the information.

"Why? She doesn't want to see it. She's going to have the baby."

"Doesn't matter. They will still expect her to sit through it, with a translator."

"This is not fair. It makes no sense at all. Mya is married. To me. We are married. She is almost half-way through her pregnancy. She wants the baby," protested Daniel. "We can prove we are married. We have photographs and" - he paused to count - "nine eye-witnesses. My six colleagues and her three family members."

"None of that matters. My bosses are not disputing that some kind of ceremony took place, but they do not recognise its validity. Unless you can prove the woman they see as your unwed girlfriend is at least 21, or married according to the laws of this country, or both, she has to see the film. The rules are extremely clear. There are no exceptions."

"Will it matter?" Daniel recalled a television advertisement she had seen for an abortion clinic. It was vague in the extreme. To someone who could not read the writing or understand the voice-over, it would have appeared to be saying something about walking through a park on a rainy day. Another he remembered had seemed like an advertisement for a home make-over service.

"It might. It might upset her a lot." The civil servant sighed. "The powers-that-be keep changing their minds about their policy. Sometimes, the government put out films encouraging girls to have terminations and to get on with their careers. Then another lot of politicians get power. They want to be able to tell their supporters that they are doing something about the abortion rate, so they insist girls watch the gory films instead." She paused for a moment and said, "At the moment, it's the gory ads which are in favour. Some women get upset by the film; others giggle and eat popcorn which they somehow manage to smuggle in. It's the part of the film they show to girls in schools to promote celibacy."

"They don't show it to boys?"

"They used to. But they didn't deem that to be cost-effective, so they decided to only show it to the girls. Hardly anyone contacted the Ministry to suggest this was sexist."

"Hardly anyone, huh?"

"Some of the Ministry's campaigns have provoked protest. They got quite a backlash against their 'If She's a Scrubber, Use a Rubber' advertisements. But few people wasted their ration of political complaints on the decision not to show the childbirth film to boys. Three people protested, to be exact. Two women and one man. I know because it was my job to answer them. I told them that the Ministry of Citizenship is driven by statistics about what is allegedly effective, and is bound neither by logic nor by concerns about any type of discrimination. 

" The man sent a copy of this to a small left-wing publication. I got a written warning for what I had said. My supervisor contacted the three people to whom I had written to apologise for my 'error of judgement'. He told them I had been going through some kind of personal crisis. I was demoted."