Last December, the newly crowned Miss Ukraine had her title stripped from her and, as a result, was disqualified from competing in the upcoming Miss World competition, to be held on December 14. The reason? She’s a mother.
Veronica Didusenko, age 24, is suing Miss World over what she believes to be serious discrimination. Didusenko is a successful model who travels internationally for her modeling career. She also has a five-year-old son who accompanies her on these trips. Has this stopped her from building her own career, or has building her career stopped her from being a mother? The answer to both of these questions is an overwhelming ‘no’ — yet that appears to be the reasoning the Miss World Organization is using to defend their disqualification of Didusenko.
According to BBC News, the CEO of the Miss World Organization contest, Julia Morley, explained in an interview, “When you’re trying to get a worldwide organization to agree, you have to look to everyone and they vote as to what is acceptable. Whatever I feel or whatever Europe feels is one thing, what the rest of the world may feel when they’ve got to look at their various religions and various things…. If you can understand we don’t just have our own feelings, we have to consider others. So what we try to do is get a balance.”
Multiple sources state that Didusenko was married at the time of her son’s birth and later divorced. Typically, having children within a marriage is not frowned upon by the world’s various religions.
READ: Defying the odds: Single mom earns two grad school degrees while raising twins
However, Didusenko did not hear of this larger picture of ‘balance’ painted by Morley. Instead, she claims she was told that she would likely be incapable of maintaining the duties of the Miss Ukraine title and her duties as the mother of a child.
Yuri Ageiev, the head of the Miss Ukraine committee, called Didusenko once the news had reached the committee and explained that attempting to keep up with her Miss Ukraine responsibilities “may negatively affect the upbringing of a small child who will be deprived of his mother’s love,” according to the New York Times.
“Deprived of his mother’s love”? Because she’s a working mother? This attitude is truly shocking.
With this rationale, single fathers — or even married fathers with families — should be questioned whether they, too, can work and parent at the same time. Yet, society seems to take no issue with working single fathers, and never questions whether they are capable of both working and parenting. No, it seems only mothers should be seen as incapable of doing both, and should feel guilt over having careers while parenting.
In the list of qualifications for the Miss World America contest, it is listed that contestants must not have been married at any point, and must have “never given birth to a child.”
Does this mean that even unmarried mothers who have chosen life and placed their children with adoptive families are disqualified, even though they are not currently parenting a child and would supposedly have nothing “holding them back” from other responsibilities? If the wording of the Miss World qualification is any indication, yes. “Giving birth to a child” is apparently a problem.
Knowing this, young women seeking the Miss World title who experience unplanned pregnancies will be under more pressure to abort their children since “giving birth” is an automatic disqualification. This is both anti-woman and anti-child.
Hopefully, Didusenko’s lawsuit will encourage a change in Miss World’s discriminatory rules.
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