This blogger has made this point before here. If Kenya insists on dealing with the subject only from a moral point of view, the outcome might be worse. The debate du jour, of course, is whether or not children in schools should be given free condoms or contraceptives in addition to being taken through what passes for sex education these days. This blogger comes down on the side of that which will keep children safe - and abstinence-only programmes have been demonstrated to be utter failures, except in the theocracies where capital punishmenthas been used as a method of the enforcement of chastity.
Statistics can be used to manipulate public opinion for or against anything, so this blogger has a leery view of statistics, especially Kenyan ones. But this blogger, as many Kenyans, is not blind. The number of teenage mothers has increased. Part of the explanation might be that parents these days aren't ostracised if their daughter is one of those girls, daughters are not killed to protect the honour of their families nor are they denied shelter because of their pregnancies.
Even pharmacists report that the demand for contraceptives and arbotifacients such as morning after pills among school-going teenagers has risen significantly, despite the exorbitant costs involved. One unreported statistic revolves around abortions among school-going children, especially unsafe ones where the one performing the abortion is inexperienced or where it is being done is in unsanitary or unsafe surroundings.
The numbers, even if they are inaccurate and improperly analysed, point to a horrific truth - teenagers are engaging in sexual activity without sufficient information or protection. It is only a matter of time before we stop worrying about teen pregnancies but about the rates of infection among teenagers that will surley become unmanageable. It is not just HIV/AIDS that we must contend with now; news out of Uganda warns of multi-drug resistant syphilis and gonorrhea, in addition to the multi-drug resistant tuberculosis which we are quite familiar with.
This shrill reaction by parents' associations and faith based organisations as well as elements of the Ministry of Education - including the Cabinet Secretary and his Principal Secretary - is foolish and naive. The parents who practice birth control whether by using contraceptives or prophylactics are not moral failures; they are responsible parents who wish to ensure that they plan when to have more children. Single adults with more than one sexual partner who use protection such as condoms might not rate highly in a church's radar regarding their morality, but these are people who care enough to protect their lives and those of their future partners when they decide to enter into monogamous relationships. The herd-protection arising out of condom-use cannot be downplayed either.
Objecting to the provision of the right information and the right tools to children for their protection will come and bite us in the ass. If parents had the time to sit with their children and advise them comprehensively about what to do - and what not to do - to keep their virtues intact, and if schools imparted the correct information to ensure that children understood the physical, psychological and physiological effects of sexuality and sexual activity, and if faith-based organisations offered the correct moral guidance to the people without being moralistic, teen sex and all its problems would not be at a crisis point that demands legislative intervention. If we cannot admit that there is a crisis and that the proposal before the National Assembly is a sensible one we will have endangered the futures of entire generations.
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