Women at Doha airport were removed from flights and forced to undergo invasive internal inspection in an ambulance on the tarmac

*I am puzzled because I can't quite see how any passenger transferring at the airport for a long-haul flight would have had a baby to leave in the toilet at the airport.

The Qatar section on pregancy while travelling with them is clear: you must have a certificate from a doctor from the 29th week of pregnancy onwards*

That's fine in theory, but the reality is the airline are not going to demand a certificate from a passenger if they do not know the passenger is pregnant.

As to another poster's comment about avoiding flying via Doha...in the current circumstances it's very difficult to get to Australia from Europe on a Long haul flight without transiting one of the Gulf state airports..

From the Guardian article earlier in the thread, it just beggars belief that this is 2020 & sex outside marriage is illegal....
It is illegal to have sex outside marriage in Qatar. In neighbouring United Arab Emirates, unmarried migrant mothers are required to serve a jail sentence before they can leave the country. Healthcare workers are required to report any unmarried mothers for breaking the law, so many choose to give birth without assistance, not in hospital.

Yes this is disgusting why isn’t there the outcry that @WeeBisom has said!

@334bu very few flights to Australia and unless you are going via the ME it’s not easy to get home

It is absolutely disgusting on all counts. Poor women, poor baby, poor mother. As I woman who had had DC I feel disgusted at the thought of such an examination, pre children I would have found it traumatic. The idea of my 11 DD having to undergo it, with or without me there fills me with horror and rage!
I wonder if the mother was a member of staff.

Also, airport toilets are very busy places.

What was done to those women was appalling and unnecessary. Anybody with an inkling of medical experience would know that a visual inspection of the abdomen is all that is required, or if you really haven't a clue, a hand placed gently on the abdomen.
Genital inspection of any kind is not necessary. What happened sounds completely gratuitous.

Does anyone remember when that poor man was dragged off an overbooked flight in America and the security were so rough with him he ended up getting a broken nose? The response to that was universal horror and outrage. I didn't hear people saying 'well it's their plane, their laws, they can drag you off the flight like a piece of garbage if they want, you have no right to be on the plane". No one thinks twice about where a plane is being rerouted and certainly no one expects to be sexually assaulted at an airport.

For an analogy, in some countries gay male sex is illegal and the authorities, disgustingly enough, sometimes perform intimate examinations on men they suspect have just had intercourse. For all the victim blamers here - if a flight was rerouted through such a country , and the authorities suspected that men had had sex in the airport would it be fine for security to intimately examine the men to ensure they hadn't committed a crime? So if you sign up to the laws of a country, a homophobic country can just...anally violate male passengers? Or is this case somehow magically different?

This thread is about the sexual assault of female passengers and nothing else. The airlines choose to use Doha as a hub in the knowledge that this is a repressive misogynistic country and in so doing put their female passengers at risk. Stop flying via Doha should be the answer.

Can we stop blaming the women already? If you think it’s the women’s fault for taking this route, whose fault is it for women who are born and brought up under their laws?

This shouldn’t be allowed in any country. End of.

I am not in the habit of flying anywhere, but if I was, I doubt I would check the laws of the countries my flight was going to be routed through.

In extreme circumstances, flights are rerouted after take-off in response to weather, mechanical faults, runway delays at the planned airport, strikes at the planned airport and Donald Trump having a twitter row with another country's head of state.

I find it unbelievable anyone is defending this state sanctioned sexual assault of multiple women. I hope the AUS government take action over this. Just appalling.

There are plenty of countries I'd not travel or via because of their stance or laws.

It's not great, horrific if you were one of those women. But again, it's comparing apples and pears. There's no consent law. State usurps everything except Allah.

I am puzzled because I can't quite see how any passenger transferring at the airport for a long-haul flight would have had a baby to leave in the toilet at the airport.

The Qatar section on pregancy while travelling with them is clear: you must have a certificate from a doctor from the 29th week of pregnancy onwards: www.qatarairways.com/en/family/expectant-mothers.html So is the Qantas one: www.qantas.com/au/en/travel-info/specific-needs/fitness-to-fly.html#pregnant-customers

If the baby was born alive and survived in spite of having been abandoned in a toilet, surely the foetus was older than 29 weeks?

Did the authorities at the airport ask whether anyone on that flight had such a certificate? The flight authorities would have known about it if anyone had. There would be no need to examine anyone from that flight, at that point.

I find it gobsmacking that there are women out there who do not realise that the mother of the baby may have been terrified of receiving a whipping/ possibly even stoning to death (depending on whether her "crime" was mere extra-marital sex or adultery).

And that they think that giving a group of women forced internal exams to which they did not consent is an appropriate response.

Think about it - baby found in park in UK. What happens next?

Generally speaking there will be a call for the mother to seek medical help, in complete confidence. (Usually even infanticide is not prosecuted in this country, the default assumption being that the woman was not of sound mind at the time). What there will not be is a door-to-door search with police officers sending every pre-menopausal woman they encounter to a nearby ambulance where she'll be told to drop her knickers.

Why do some women have such a huge degree of internalised misogyny?

Sex out of wedlock

My understanding is that being unmarried and having sex is a crime. This country apparently makes unmarried migrants with children serve a prison sentence when they arrive. The belief in some quarters is they assume that abandoned babies are a result of serous of wedlock and therefore a crime has been committed- never mind the abandonment or welfare of baby. The reports I read is that is why they were huntin* for the mother

There’s little other explanation here. She abandoned an infant in the toilets, and it could have easily died

I got one

She left the child in the toilet where it would be found, luckily the baby didnt die

Doesn’t matter how you say it we have no idea whether she left the baby to die or she left it to be found or she was in such a state she didnt know what she was doing

Isn't Qatar a country that punishes women for premarital sex? If so the mother could be at severe risk and it's understandable that she was in a high state of panick after giving birth in the toilet. That doesn't mean that I approve of leaving the baby behind but this very probably isn't a black and white story about a cold neglectful mother.

Which makes me think that the mother is probably a local woman and that makes it even more odd that they decided to rape a group of Australian women (and no it would have been equally bad if they had done this to local women). Yes, rape, I have no other word for it.

Quite right @NewlyGranny

Is it really beyond the empathetic capacity of a few folk here to consider the plight of the newborn, it's desperate mother AND the unconnected women ordered off a flight and sexually assaulted without explanation or opportunity to consent or refuse?

Surely it's obvious that all of these individuals are the victims of a callous and misogynistic regime? Why is that so hard to grasp and where does the compulsion to play either/or, as if compassion is a zero sum game, come from?

As for suggesting that women who are in transit through a foreign country have unknowingly signed up to every atrocity that might be visited on them and ought to have known better, that's victim blaming: simple but not pure.

I will not be giving the oxygen of attention to any further such ridiculous assertions. Others will make their own decisions.

Fucking horrific.

There’s little other explanation here. She abandoned an infant in the toilets, and it could have easily died.

Or are you suggesting that it was dumped by someone other than the mother?

However, the authorities virtually sexually assaulted these unrelated women when they could have used other methods to track down the mother. Shows how little they regard the dignity of and bodily autonomy of other people

There is a further report here. There were women from all over the World on that flight, thirteen of them were Australian. It would seem that the deceased baby was a premature foetus. What an awful experience for all the women involved.

www.facebook.com/7NEWSsydney/videos/australian-women-humiliated-and-searched-invasively-at-doha-airport/376980766686657/

Although no capitals. If it’s on the internet it’s true if you put fact in capitals after a statement. FACT.

Shit yeah

I forgot about that...doh