Teenage pregnancy -- let's talk about sex baby

The sad discovery of a dead baby in a school bag should bring it home to all of us how scared young women are to talk about sex, sexuality and pregnancy. And perhaps it also shows how poor our tactics of talking to them have been. The Oprah school saga is only one fragment of the broken mirror reflecting back on all of us. As Verashni aptly puts it: “You can police the schools gates … but you can’t police the devastating effects of a broken social order on the girls themselves.” This dead baby is more than just bad PR.

The impact of teenage pregnancy on teenage girls is incredibly complex. Often they are required to leave the educational institution that they are studying at and they rarely return. They lose their opportunity for economic independence and another mouth to feed places more pressure on their family home. The burden of raising their child often falls on their mother or grandmother, who is already bearing the burden of care at home. Girls face social shaming and blaming, and exclusion from their peers and sometimes from their family. This leaves them without the support structure they need when raising their baby or dealing with the loss of their child.

Girls bodies (at least those who are younger than 15) are not well-equipped to carry a baby, and they are rarely emotionally or psychologically developed enough to process their loss when they miscarry or their responsibility when they successfully deliver a baby. In addition, because of the physical development of the vagina, sex with young girls is likely to tear their vaginal tissue making them more susceptible to HIV infection if having unprotected sex. Complications with pregnancy and childbirth are the leading cause of mortality for women between 15 and 19 in the developing world.

Yet teenage pregnancy is a tsunami that is not only taking over South African soil, but exists around the world. The United States and the United Kingdom having the highest rates of teenage pregnancy of all the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries. So what’s the similarity? There is the argument that in sub-Saharan Africa the fathers of these children are much older men, whereas in the developed world it is boys of a similar age. So in one instance an age gap is blamed, whereas in the developed world this is not a suitable excuse.

I think that what’s going on is complex. First, young girls are taught that sexuality is wrong and abnormal. They are not engaged in discussion about their sexuality, their feelings of sexual desire or their rights to their own sexuality. Instead masturbation is rejected as taboo, schools suggest prayer or penance for sexual thoughts and they only hear one silly message — abstain. But the reality is that when you become a teenager you want to do sexual things. You want to explore, you might even want to have sex. When the only discussions you’ve been able to have have been about how bad these feelings are, it is unlikely that you will know who to ask for protection beyond a condom (ie the pill or the injection or the patch) plus it is unlikely that you will be able to talk to your sexual partner about the limits of your sexual exploration and where you are comfortable going.

Second, boys are still shaped by messages of men having no control over their desire, being virile as central to masculinity and by the belief that women’s bodies are not their own. Boys too do not get a chance to talk about healthy sexuality with adults or their teachers. They rely on the messages that society puts out to tell them what it means to be a sexual teenager.

What we need to do, in the words of Salt-n-Pepa, is talk about sex baby. These young people need to know that they can talk about sex. Moreover, we need to provide safe spaces for them to do so. Teens need to know about the services available to them should they wish to get contraception, have a safe abortion or know the law when it comes to sex. Kids are not going to abstain but providing them with the knowledge about how they can safely negotiate their sexuality, their health and their adolescence might go some way to helping them have safer sex.