Medical Students Can Help to Protect Women Rights

This article was exclusively written for The European Sting by Mr. Ahmet Kayhan KORKUSUZ, a first-year medical student at Istanbul Medipol University, Turkey. He is affiliated to the International Federation of Medical Students Associations (IFMSA), cordial partner of The Sting. The opinions expressed in this piece belong strictly to the writer and do not necessarily reflect IFMSA’s view on the topic, nor The European Sting’s one.

It’s been 21st century. We all people around the world have been learned a lot. We have established states, made regulations, given the equal rights to all people. The countries may have developed a lot, but they have the same problem coming from the past: The violation of women’s rights.

To start with, gender does not affect your rights. Everyone around the world has equal rights, and those rights start in the womb and end by the time person dies. All those rights are irreplaceable; however, people can restrict them due to some regulations. To illustrate, someone can get his or her rights restricted, such as freedom to walk on the street, which sometimes becomes real due to the lockdown rules.

Surely, those rights need to be respected. In the global world, people tend to be more social and respectful to others, and they care about women right a lot when we compare today to the past. In the past, we can see that some countries such as Yemen, and Saudi Arabia did not care about women’s rights – regrettably, they haven’t cared about it either. What happens in kind of those countries is that the women are seen as objects; sometimes a sex object, another time just a person having to take care of children. It does not matter whether men marry more than one woman, it is just women belong to men. This idea has been changing globally, and we have stepped forward.

Another important point is that what we should do, as medical students, about this violation of women’s rights. We always face women patients we apply the same procedure that is applied to men, but this is not enough to make the old idea pass. We all should be organized, whenever we see a woman patient who was beat by her husband, or whose rights have been violating because of men, the move should be find a way to get her out of her situation. This could be getting her to the emergency room, etc. After making sure that her rights are being violated, it is enough to contact other stuff. This should not end here; it is a must to follow up her after getting out of the hospital. In this manner, we can be saving more women than ever.

To sum up, we have rights because we are human beings. Those rights cannot be replaced but can be restricted in case. When it comes to women’s rights, most people around the world have been respecting them, however, not all yet. What we should do as medical students are to make sure we saved her rights by advocating at the hospital, or court. When the idea coming past ends, the world will be better than ever.

About the author

Ahmet Kayhan KORKUSUZ is a first-year medical student at Istanbul Medipol University, Turkey. He is affiliated to TurkMSIC, and IFMSA. He always attends the events, webinars of TurkMSIC, EMSA, IFMSA, EHFG and EUPHA. He wants to be a cardiologist in the future because he is interested in the heart. He hopes that he will be able to help to all people around the world by being an international cardiologist.