Wednesday 6 July 2016

Boyfriend Disappears After Impregnating and Infecting Teen With HIV

The girl is defiant. As we stand with hundreds of young women queuing  outside a health Centre, she tells me how she fell pregnant unexpectedly in September 2014 aged 15.

Her boyfriend fled a week after he found out she was expecting. Days later, she learnt that she was HIV positive.

Excluded by many in her community, the girl left school to look after her son who is now eleven months old. She had to give up her dreams of becoming a teacher.

She now sells home-grown vegetables at a market in Alego Usonga Sub County in an attempt to provide for her son.

She doesn't sound like she has much to be grateful for except that her son is not HIV positive.

She is a lucky woman. Many teenage girls in her circumstances fare worse. Unintended pregnancy is one of the biggest causes of death in teenage girls in Siaya County.

Young women aged 15 to 19 are twice as likely to die from complications in pregnancy as are women in their twenties.

For mothers under 18, their babies' chance of dying in the first year of life is 60 per cent greater than that of a baby born to someone aged 19 or older.

The fact that the girl and so many other young women are in this snaking queue is a sign of hope.

Soon she will be injected with a contraceptive implant that will protect her from the risk of another unwanted pregnancy for the next three years.

She will also receive ARVs and more information on how to live positively.

The girl is no longer one of the 215 million women around the world with no means of accessing contraception and family planning services and information.

Women with unmet needs account for 82 per cent of the 75 million unintended pregnancies that occur globally every year.
Access to family planning services could reduce the number of maternal deaths by a third. Like so many of the women around us, the girl says she was too young to have a child when she did.

She looks at her son, now balanced on her hip, and adds quietly: "If I had known about contraceptives before, I would have taken them."

Unlike in developed countries, pregnancy is not primarily a lifestyle in most of developing countries.

Every year 358,000 women die due to pregnancy or childbirth. Many of these women did not plan to be pregnant. Equally tragic is that 47,000 women die every year because of unsafe abortions.

While government policy states adolescents should have access to comprehensive family planning, there is stigma supplying contraceptives to teens, getting them into the clinics and dispelling the myths that surround the services.

In Alego Usonga Sub County almost half of the teenagers have children. According to a senior nurse at the hospital, around 10 per cent of births in Alego Usonga Sub County involve girls under 15 years.

It is estimated that more lives could still be saved every year if there was more family planning provided in the county.

There is actually a need to fund family planning in Siaya County. Teenage pregnancy is a "BIG ISSUE" in Siaya County and needs to be addressed urgently.

In Siaya County, 60-70 per cent of the population are under the age of 30. Family planning is the most important human development intervention because it enables young people to make choices about their lives.

It also ensures women can have the number of children they want and can look after; and it gives them the possibility to protect themselves from infectious diseases.

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