A Single Mother’s Fight to Free Her Daughter From Saudi Arabia
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Many single moms and their children are trapped there. She was adamant that her daughter wouldn’t be among them.
She had kept her pregnancy a secret, hiding her growing belly beneath loose and lengthy robes as she scrubbed floors and folded laundry for a middle-class family. In this oil-rich kingdom, an unmarried woman risked jail if discovered pregnant.
Her friends had urged her to get an illegal abortion. But this child, unexpected as it was, was her last link to the man she had loved.
Edith did not see a doctor. Hospitals, if they agreed to treat unmarried mothers, sometimes turned them over to the police. So she labored for hours on her thin mattress, accompanied by a midwife.
Finally, just after midday on Jan. 20, 2016 — soon after her 42nd birthday — she gave birth to a girl.
