Teenagers are sexually active. Let us give them choices to do it more safely

Junior Health Minister Margaret Muhanga said it was just a proposal and not policy. By the time other MPs had finished weighing in, rigor mortis had set in. As public policy making goes, this was yet another example of politics getting in the way of science, emotion weighing down reason and logic. To see why, let’s start with the emotions that make us human. No parent wants their child to be sexually active before they come of age. And, as this column has noted severally, we have a pandemic of sexual abuse of minors which has become normalised, and against which we should not surrender. But growing up teaches us to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. 

A good way to do this is to listen to the head, not the heart, and to use facts to make decisions. One thousand teenage pregnancies are reported in Uganda every day. That’s 41 per hour. Essentially, a teenager gets pregnant in Uganda every two minutes. Some of them, sadly, are victims of rape, to give defilement its real monstrous name. But many are just underage wives. Some are driven into early marriage by poverty, others by honest mistakes. The ensuing pregnancies do not reflect the world we want. It reflects the world in all its unfairness and inequality.
Conservatives worry that giving teenagers information about sexual and reproductive health makes them more likely to start early, do a lot of it, and with many partners.

There is a lot of data to show that this isn’t true – look it up; Google is your friend.
Teenagers are not sexually active because they have received information about sexual and reproductive health; they are active because they have hormones, a proclivity to experimentation, a genetic instinct for reproduction, time, and flat surfaces. The d in this drama is not the devil!

One in four Ugandan women have given birth by the time they turn 18. By this time they have already dropped out of school or are on their way to do so. The first baby is often followed by another, trapping the mother and her offspring in a cycle of poverty.
Girls born to teenage mothers are more likely to become teenage mothers themselves. Yet keeping girls in school and delaying their first pregnancies is as close to a magic bullet as you can get to improving social-economic outcomes. It is up there with immunisation and providing clean drinking water. So yes, we should try to delay the age at which young people become sexually active. But if, for whatever reason, they are not able to abstain, we should inform them about safer sexual behaviour and let them have safe access to contraceptives. This will keep them from sexually transmitted infections and unwanted pregnancies. Even those who become young mothers can get a second chance by delaying subsequent pregnancies if they have this access. They can return to school or get a chance to build careers while giving better care to their children.

It is easy to moralise about these matters and bind the devil not to lead young people into temptation. But the devil is a liar, and the human flesh is weak. Public policy should be developed empirically based on reason, not faith. Hope is not a good public health strategy.

Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and  poor man’s freedom fighter. 
[email protected]; @Kalinaki