“Children need to be children, not to bring them into the world” insists, worried, Save the Children. It must be said that there is cause for alarm: teenage pregnancies, even pre-adolescents, have exploded in South Africa since the coronavirus pandemic, notes the NGO, citing a 60% increase in the region of Johannesburg, the most populous in the country.
New statistics released by the Department of Health of Gauteng Province, where a quarter of South Africans live around Johannesburg and the capital Pretoria, show that more than 23,000 minors gave birth between April 2020 and March 2021, including 934 were under fourteen.
Pregnancies that lock you in poverty
In South Africa, early childbearing forces many girls, already stigmatized because their pregnancies are frowned upon or may mean forced marriage, to drop out of school and “lock them into a cycle of poverty and dependence on children. public aid ”, underlines the NGO. “Seeing a child turn into a mother is heartbreaking. […] It is particularly devastating to learn that so many of the girls who gave birth last year were barely teenagers, ”notes Save the Children health and nutrition manager Marumo Sekgobela.
The pandemic therefore risks being synonymous with “irreversible setbacks and lost progress” for young girls, he insists, calling on the authorities in particular to facilitate the dissemination of essential information on contraception and protection against STDs. South African adolescents do not receive sufficient sex education, notes the association, nor access to “affordable and appropriate” health services.