Teenage pregnancy and scaremongering; what a waste of time!

This Sunday was one of those days. I noticed one of the DStv channels was showing a movie titled “Our Community School”. I did not watch the whole movie. I only saw the last three scenes. But these three scenes pretty much summarized the movie to a large extent.

In this scenes, a mother was basically berating one of her daughters, who led a promiscuous lifestyle and ended up getting pregnant. She became the black sheep while her other sisters excelled in school, with one even getting a scholarship to study abroad.

The morale of the story is, if you learn hard and be a so-called good girl, you do well at school. The opposite leaves you with an unplanned pregnancy and an eventual blot in your education prospect.

For some reason this annoyed the hell out of me when I watched the young girl cry her eyes out while her mother added insult to injury - comparing her to her other sisters.

This affected me so much it made me think about how the mass media’s influence on the younger generation cannot be overemphasized. The media in subliminal or explicit way shapes the way people live. The impact is even stronger now because of social media. This should cause us to think twice about the content we put out there.

The thing is, we are flipping a lot of narratives in the country but this particular one. Stories of how unplanned pregnancies ruin one's education and life is constantly told in the media. It is the narrative in movies, short films, features and skits acted out in churches and other national gatherings and yet many more girls continue to get pregnant and dropout of school.

The statistics on teenage pregnancies are still horrifying. In the first half of 2017, Marie Stopes International reported that about 57,000 girls got pregnant - 31 of them died through pregnancy complications.

Yes, teenage girls get pregnant and dropout of school. Yes, some have a hard life as a result. But there is another side to this story where girls defy all the odds to pursue their dreams after getting pregnant.

One early morning in 2009, a 15-year-old Abrafi, who lived across my street told her mum that she had an intense feeling in her stomach. Her mom asked her to describe that feeling and she said she felt somebody was kicking her from the inside of her stomach.

Her mom knew it was pregnancy related but she had to get a doctor to confirm it.

It turned out she was six months pregnancy. Her mother asked her what she wanted to do and her answer was “I want to keep my baby”. Her mom then told her how her life was going to change and how she was going to be there to support her through it all.

Fast forward, the little boy she gave birth to is 8 years old now. After giving birth she picked her life back up. She went back to school, finished her SHS education despite the ridicule from some of her mates and neighbours. She is now a trained nurse.

There are many more of these stories of how many women have overcome all the odds and made a good future for themselves despite having an unplanned pregnancy at an early stage.

These are the stories that should be told in films, movies, books, etc. because guess what? Despite all the scaremongering, the threats of a bad life if pregnancy is not delayed in adolescent girls (which is true in most cases) young girls are still getting pregnant and dropping out of school and losing hope anyway. The education should continue unabated but we should not paint the picture that there is no hope after they give birth.

We should tell the other side of the narrative which is screaming hope and possibility. It is more than possible for young girls to still go for your dreams during and after your pregnancy.