The Supreme Court’s recent ruling in defense of a woman’s legal rights against the cruel weaponization of her infertility marks a powerful repudiation of entrenched patriarchal norms. But a singular judgment — no matter how progressive — cannot dismantle a system that still subjects women to legal re-victimization and cultural degradation. If justice is to become more than an abstract ideal, both our courts and our society must undergo a fundamental transformation.
For generations, the venomous roots of toxic patriarchy have rendered womanhood in Pakistan an unending ordeal — suffocating liberties, extinguishing autonomy, and denying elemental entitlements in every arena from domestic confines to judicial halls and governing echelons. This ceaseless tyranny calls not merely for awareness but for redress at the structural core.
In this context, the Supreme Court’s landmark pronouncement on July 23 emerges as an inflection point, courageously unmasking one grotesque manifestation of gendered injustice — the malignant use of a woman’s infertility as a cudgel to disenfranchise her of her lawful rights. The court’s voice rings with uncommon candor and indignation.
Presiding over the matter, Chief Justice Yahya Afridi dismantled the petitioner husband’s callous campaign to deny his estranged spouse her rightful maintenance and dower. Withering in his condemnation, the chief justice rebuked not only the man’s desertion of his wife within a year of their marriage — and his chronic refusal to support her thereafter — but also his malevolent orchestration of prolonged judicial harassment.
Years after abandoning her, the petitioner slithered back into the legal sphere, contending that his wife was biologically inadequate, medically unfit for marital intimacy, and unable to bear offspring. He invoked these fabrications to attack her very legal identity as a woman — a ploy laced with vindictiveness and cruelty. His assertions, unequivocally discredited by medical evaluations, became the grotesque centerpiece of his legal stratagem. Through this, he subjected his wife to years of public vilification, psychological torment, and deeply invasive gynecological examinations, rendering the courtroom an arena of humiliation rather than justice.
In his seven-page decree — which included a punitive fine of Rs500,000 for the petitioner’s slanderous posturing — Chief Justice Afridi laid down an unambiguous legal ethos: a woman’s fertility, or the perceived lack thereof, can never serve as grounds to invalidate her entitlement to dower or maintenance. Nor can it be wielded to question her femininity in the eyes of the law.
This verdict delivers more than judicial clarity — it signals a resolute moral stance. In a nation where countless women are routinely dispossessed of economic sustenance on threadbare or fictitious pretenses, this ruling fortifies the legal bulwark against misogynistic manipulation. It affirms with irrefutable authority: the days of weaponizing a woman’s body as legal ammunition must end.
Though the Supreme Court’s verdict stands as a beacon of moral clarity, it remains but a single strike against a far-reaching architecture of injustice. The rot runs deeper. Legal machinery, weaponized by malicious intent, still permits women to be dragged through agonizing procedural labyrinths that should have never existed in the first place. As Chief Justice Yahya Afridi rightly observed, women in our social fabric remain an imperiled cohort whose dignity demands vigilant, unwavering guardianship.
In a system that truly honors justice, the respondent — already wronged and abandoned — would not have been compelled to publicly defend her very womanhood. This indignity, a byproduct of the lower judiciary’s procedural insensitivity, underscores the urgent need for foundational reform. While the apex court has in recent years emerged as a rare citadel of gender justice, it is in the trial courts — the first interface for most litigants — where compassion, nuance, and gender literacy are most desperately required. Without it, the legal process degenerates into a re-traumatization chamber, compounding the very harm it is meant to remedy.
Hence, the time for cosmetic pledges is long past. There must be institutionalized training for judges and legal officers in gender-responsive jurisprudence, airtight procedural safeguards, and an overhaul of adjudicatory ethos that centers empathy and dignity for female litigants. Justice must not come draped in procedural cruelty.
Equally imperative is a societal reckoning with the archaic fixation on fertility — a patriarchal specter that haunts countless women. The reduction of a woman’s worth to her ability to conceive is a barbarism cloaked in tradition. This stigma, baked into familial expectations and cultural folklore, silently empowers structural misogyny, turning personal health conditions and life choices into cudgels for shame and exclusion.
To unravel this deeply embedded bias, society must abandon its fetishization of reproductive capability. Only then can women move through their lives — and the courts — without being measured, judged, or discarded on the basis of their biology. The path to justice begins not only in the courtroom but also in the dismantling of every cultural edifice that denies women their full and equal humanity.
The court’s decision offers more than legal relief — it offers hope. But hope must be followed by systemic change. Legal institutions must be restructured with gender-aware safeguards, and the cultural script that equates womanhood with fertility must be torn down. Until then, women will continue to be judged in courtrooms and households not by their character or rights, but by their wombs. Justice demands more — and so should we.