Who Owns Your Death? | The Ethics of Women-Only Ride-Sharing Apps

From Saudi Arabia to Indonesia, and Pakistan to Bangladesh, ride-sharing apps catering specifically to women are emerging – and growing fast.

New Delhi–based Shailja Mittal had hired a cab driver to take her 11-year-old daughter to school. But one day, when he didn’t show up and sent another man instead, the mother in her decided to take charge. The city routinely ranks in polls as among the most unsafe in the world for women, and a worried Mittal drove her daughter to school herself. But she didn’t stop there. The incident sowed the seeds for Koala Kabs, a ride-hailing service the 34-year-old launched in June 2017, with an entirely female team of drivers catering only to female passengers.

The startup is among a fast-growing series of ride-sharing services across Asia that are either emerging or reshaping themselves to offer safe travel options to women as they increasingly step out of homes into public spaces that are often still unsafe for them. For some, it’s an act of resistance coinciding with the consciousness of the #MeToo era. For others, there’s the economic incentive of an untapped market, as even the most conservative societies like Saudi Arabia gradually give women more rights.

With suicide still being illegal in lots of places but physician-assisted suicide making recent inroads into how we die, we ask: who owns your death?

A friend had tried to kill himself. Four times. To have four suicide attempts you must at first have three failed suicides. As he lay unmoving on the porcelain floor of his San Francisco bathroom though, the burnt spoon on the sink edge and a needle in his arm, the options for dealing with his first, heroin-fueled suicide attempt were all over the place.

Leave him as he lay — he had long professed an interest in ending his life — or bring him back from the brink. And if we were to bring him back from the brink, how so? We were advised to call 911, an option that was less appealing to those who also didn’t like the idea of speaking to the police.

“They won’t bother you,” said a doctor friend we had called for advice. The cops didn’t show; the paramedics did. But according to cop friends, the only thing that would have impinged on our friend’s desire to end his life would have been the almost 30-year-old 5150 Welfare and Institutions Code. It allows the cops to pick up potential suicides – who are dangers to themselves or others – and take them “into custody for a period of up to 72 hours for assessment, evaluation and crisis intervention.”

It ran for just two years in the early 1920s, but The Brownies’ Book altered the landscape of Black children’s literature.

Every revolutionary magazine needs a striking cover, and in January 1920, one appeared. It was a photograph of an African-American girl donning a fairy costume and crown. The title page of that issue contained an even bolder statement: “This is The Brownies’ Book,” it proclaimed in large font, “A Monthly Magazine For the Children of the Sun. Designed for All Children, But Especially For Ours.”

When The Brownies’ Book first hit presses in 1920, stories for or about Black children were largely missing from the landscape of children’s literature. And what did exist was riddled with grotesque caricatures and stereotypes. As the creators of The Brownies’ Book, including the scholar and visionary W.E.B. Du Bois, put it: “All of the Negro child’s idealism, all his sense of the good, the great and the beautiful is associated with White people … He unconsciously gets the impression that the Negro has little chance to be great, heroic or beautiful.”