Women rights are human rights - the desired cultural shift
Rights which Merck’s More than a Mother campaign aims to uplift
Rights where no relationship is laden with grief and rift
Rights where no woman withers childless for eternity downshift
Rights where no woman is subjugated and abandoned adrift
The call of our time is real, loud, clear and swift
The point is, respect and dignity is women rights and not a gift
We must vanquish the cultural dogma
A culture that promotes childlessness as the vehicle for stigma
A culture that generates the blaming of women as an enigma
A culture where men and even some societies huff and puff magma
A culture that inflicts physical and psychological harm beyond stigma
Good riddance to dogma and stigma, and wheel in social kerygma
Merck’s More than a Mother is replacing stigma with carta de magna
Stonewalling the cry of the childless has consequences
Ostracism and cultural exclusion are the dreaded effluence
That Merck More than a Mother will conquer via idea confluence
The African Fertility Society is engaged to impact and influence
National awareness, policies and legislation to achieve congruence
Needed to generate harmonious social affluence
To wrap Merck’s more than a Mother campaign with excellence
Jacqueline can be born again as a self-sufficient entity
In the kingdom where child pursuit isn’t the identity
Where no machete shall ever wipe out any fingerprint identity
We shall collectively craft and deepen Jackie’s new identity
To instill self-belief and empowerment to nourish that identity
And ultimately, to immortalize her new unique identity
No woman should ever live under the cosh
Women shall be liberated from the slosh
Jacqueline is now on her way out of the tosh
Uganda’s Berna is already empowered and posh
Grace’s fruit and vegetable stall in Nairobi is no bosh
Noonkipa’s dairy cows generate for her enough dosh
So the Masai woman is no man’s nosh
Yes, at last the shame of infertility has met its kibosh.
Author: Dr James Olobo-Lalobo, Vice President, Africa Fertility Society