Love them. Don't leave them.

Pregnancy is not a disease. Motherhood, even single motherhood, is not a social disease. It is not a sin. It is not a crime. It is not wrong. That said, a primary school girl below the age of fourteen should not be having babies. Ever. She should be plotting, just like her co-educationists of the masculine gender, to sneak out of her daddy's house and head for the Jam Session at Dolce or whatever new joint hormonal teens seem to discover these days. Or if she happens to be the more experimental type, she should be working out the various potencies of the various strains of cannabis grown in Kenya. She should not be having babies.

But if she does, the last thing she needs is for her father to condemn her for bringing his name low, her mother to be ashamed of her because she is no longer a "good girl", her teachers to abandon her education, he headmaster to expel her from school, her friends to ostracize her, her church to reject her and her extended family to punish her. What she needs is love, care, support and counselling. What she needs is her father to defend her against the world if she needs him to, her mother to hold her head high and declare her daughter beyond reproach, her teachers to guarantee that a baby will not stop them from getting her to attain the academic distinctions she will surely need, her friends to accept that she has not changed save for having a baby, her church to remember the words of Jesus regarding the fallen woman, and her extended family to rally behind her because it really does take a village to raise a child in Kenya.

I do not know from where this puritanical bent arose in the breast of the Victorian man, but its export to Kenya has been devastating to our sense of community that for so long was the only bulwark in sometimes harsh times. It is drilled into our heads from the moment we can sub-consciously conjugate verbs that sex is wrong, bad, evil - bad manners! By and large our primary schools are co-ed, boys and girls rubbing along together. But our teachers, our parents, our faith-leaders, everyone goes out of their way to reinforce the sex-is-bad mantra with corollaries - talking to boys/girls alone is wrong; touching boys/girls is wrong; walking with boys/girls alone is wrong; thinking about boys./girls is wrong; boys/girls are wrong, wrong, wrong! Generation after generation has heard this message and generation after generation teen pregnancies have defied the sex-is-wrong, boys/girls-are-wrong message.

We have a better understanding of the effects of hormones on decision-making among teenagers. There are still mysteries to how the brain, and therefore the mind, functions, but a lot more scientific data is available about the effects of biochemistry, the environment, parental supervision, physical health, economic status, psychological maturity and much more on why some boys and some girls will experiment sexually and why others will not, and as a result, some girls will fall pregnant, others will not. Instead of accepting what the rest of the educated world has come to accept regarding the choices available to a young mother or her needs, our entire society freaks out on a massive scale and declares that the sky is falling. We abandon them. We make their lives hell. We act with un-Christian cruelty.

Any father who throws his daughter out of the family home for having a child should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, if he will not reconsider his cruel decree. Any teacher who refuses to teach a pregnant student should give up on educating other children. Any headmaster who expels the girl should be shot. And mothers must learn to put their children first, even if it means putting them first before God, family, friends or society. It is the only way we can learn to live with the choices made in hormonal haste and design programmes to cope with them, for they will always be there. The hundreds of thousands of successful, thriving single mothers are all the proof we need that it is not wrong to help them, support them and, yes, love them as Christ asked us to love them.