Is Kenya sacrificing or saving its young girls in its latest moves to prevent some people, who we are calling ‘criminals’, from having sexual intercourse with minors without contraception?
For this is how it works, and the thing I am slightly not getting my head around. Apparently, there are some people who want to engage with under-20-year-olds without contraception, but don’t want to become fathers, or be identified as having engaged with minors without contraception, so they then send these girls for morning after pills, in order to conduct their nefarious activities without consequences.
That much I follow, at least to some small extent: although would that the girls were still live to the absence of HIV protection from morning-after pills.
But it’s the next bit that is flooring me. So, with the girls’ access to morning-after pills stopped, these same people, ‘criminals’, will now stop engaging with young girls at all — or, at least, without contraception — being such responsible people that they wouldn’t want said girls to get involved with illegal or legal abortions or be left as single mothers?
Now, it’s always possible I grew up, lived in, have been a woman on some other planet, but my own experience is that the same guys who go for minors without contraception, in the first place, and in our era of HIV, are the least worried about the wellbeing of those girls.
Stopping the route of those girls to post-coital contraception is not likely to weigh heavily on that kind of person in the heat of that moment.
It will, however, leave many a young Kenyan with an unwanted pregnancy. We still lose thousands of young mothers each year during pregnancy, but some 17 percent of them die as a result of illegitimate and poorly executed abortions.
So let’s gamble. If we remove the morning-after pill, will we stop ‘the night before’, or gain a baby or abortion or dead teenager?
As it is, our sexual health services are in disarray lately, after an eventually overturned case against one organisation that saw it closed down for apparently giving contraceptives to teenagers.
It got cleared, but to add this piece to the jigsaw, in Kenya, services cannot give contraceptives or contraceptive advice to teenagers, nor can anyone give them morning-after pills.
But happily that means they won’t then have sex.
Except, here, I should really arrange a snip-out of the table from the TradingEconomics website, packed with data, labelled ‘Kenya – Median Age At First Sexual intercourse (women aged 25-49)’. Don’t be misled, this means that women in that age bracket have reported their age at first intercourse.
Now, it’s got older, because, back in 1998, most Kenyan teenagers had had sex by the time they were 16 and a half years old, whereas now, we reach the point of ‘most’ at 17 years and about three or four months.
So, with our new strategy of ensuring no-one under 20 can access contraception, that should mean, if all goes well and according to plan, and based on the facts, that approaching two million young Kenyan girls (up to age 19) can have their first sexual intercourse without contraception, in any five years.
Now, hands up, I am struggling to see the health, wellbeing, and Kenyan benefits from this extraordinary move. I guess our HIV fell too much for someone? Or we want faster population growth? Or younger mothers, or more single-parent families? Or more teenage pregnancies?
As it is, here I stand ready for any explanation of the ‘outcomes’ from all that no-access-to-contraception intercourse that’s good news.
Because I know that our government is always there making sure we build and have a better Kenya, so I know that stopping youngsters from having contraception, when our HIV is still one of the worst in the world in western Kenya, must be for a good reason — that I can’t see, only because I am ill-informed and not abreast of the latest facts on human behaviour and thinking.
Until then, obviously, it just must be better our girls have intercourse, as they do according to the data, without contraception.
PAYE Tax Calculator
Note: The results are not exact but very close to the actual.
