Where Pregnancy Is a Prison Sentence

'Love Cases' kill women for having sex outside of marriage.

According to Human Rights Watch, there are no statistics on the number of 'Zina cases' – their official name – but they occur in most of the Middle East and North Africa and mostly affect low-skilled migrant women.

In this piece for Bright Magazine, Ana P. Santos follows the story of a migrant Bangladeshi woman who lives in Qatar and is being accused of pregnancy outside of wedlock. For that, she could go to jail. But if she cannot prove that she is divorced from her Bangladeshi husband, she could be charged with adultery and sentenced to death by stoning.

Because of the stigma around these convictions, women's families often don't report their stories, and so 'Zina cases' are unknown to the world.

An investigation by BBC Arabic in the United Arab Emirates suggested that in many cases these women are victims of rape. The system facilitates sexual abuse and silences it, as migrant women need permission from their employer for everything: even for going to the mall to buy contraceptives – if they have any knowledge about them in the first place.