What should we do when the teenage pregnancy rate in Thailand is among the highest in the world? Help them, or punish them for deviating from good-girl norms?
We all know what we should do, which is to help young mothers as best we can so they can have a future and so that newborns — should the girls choose to finish their pregnancy — are well taken care of. The sad reality is that our society is still punishing girls with unplanned pregnancies severely — not only with grave social stigma but, quite often, with death.
Last week, the UN Population Fund Thailand (UNFPA) and the National Economic and Social Development Board (NESDB) launched a report, “Motherhood in Childhood: Facing the Challenge of Adolescent Pregnancy” in order to turn things around.
According to the report, the ratio of Thai teens giving birth is 54:1,000 in 2012, a sharp rise from 31:1,000 in 2000. The average ratio of teenage pregnancy in Asia and the Pacific is only 35:1,000.
“Every year, there are more than 125,000 girls 19 years old and younger in Thailand who become mothers. That is one out of every 20 girls in this age group,” said Caspar Peek, representative, UNFPA Thailand Country Office.
“And if you assume that for each girl who becomes a mother, there are two more who are pregnant but have an abortion, it might be that as many as 350,000 girls fall pregnant each year. That means one out of every seven girls in Thailand. Far too many,” he said.
Who could argue with that?
Of the 125,000 teenage mums, 4,000 of them are under 15. That is 10 girls under 15 giving birth in Thailand every day, or two every two hours.
According to the NESDB, the national plan is to reduce teenage pregnancy to 50:1,000 within five years. Here are some of the solutions offered by the two agencies:
Stop blaming the girls. Empower them to protect themselves. Better sex education based on gender equality and mutual respect. More understanding for teenagers from parents, teachers and society. Closer supervision and care for the kids. Expand family planning services to teenagers while ensuring free and easy access to birth control and protected sex. The two agencies also stress the need to provide teenage mums with education and training for work opportunities as well as the setting up of one-stop crisis centres to provide the girls with information and health services.
Again, who can argue with that? But we have heard all this before, haven’t we? And we will surely hear this set of recommendations again and again for years to come because our deeply patriarchal society still fiercely believes adolescent mums are “bad girls” deserving to be punished.
According to the report, the rise of adolescent pregnancy in many developing countries is to a large extent caused by poverty. In Thailand, however, it stems from a clash between traditional Thai cultural norms and rapidly changing adolescent lifestyles, including sexual behaviour.
That is a polite way of saying our society is extremely sexist.
The obstacles in tackling teenage pregnancy here do not lie with the lack of resources. Both the Public Health and Education ministries receive a big share of the national budget. The misogyny in the system refuses to extend rightful services to girls and women.
Despite the seemingly comprehensive policy solutions from the NESDB and UNFPA, one crucial thing is missing — safe and cheap services to end unplanned pregnancies.
About 1,000 women die each year from complications from incomplete abortions. This should not happen. There are clinically proven safe pills to end pregnancy that are available in other countries but banned in Thailand. There is also an easy and safe technique promoted by the World Health Organisation called Manual Vacuum Aspiration (MVA) for safe abortions. Yet the health authorities here refuse to adopt it. Instead, they insist on continuing with the painful and less safe scraping of the uterus to punish “morally loose girls” for being pregnant out of wedlock.
There are many ways to tackle teenage pregnancy. But if we still refuse to confront the abortion issue the chance to help adolescent mums is slim and more lives will be lost while society upholds its sexist norms.
Sanitsuda Ekachai is editorial page editor, Bangkok Post.