Is There a Wave of Teenage Lockdown Pregnancies in SA?
An article in The Outlier examines whether the spike in teenage pregnancies in Gauteng could signal a tsunami of teenage pregnancies caused by the lockdown and increased sexual assaults.
In August the Gauteng MEC for health, Nomathemba Mokgethi, revealed that 23 226 teenage girls had fallen pregnant in the province between April 2020 and March 2021. This came in a written response to questions from the DA tabled in the Gauteng legislature. Alarmingly, 934 of them were between the ages of 10 and 14, where the age of consent is 16.
There were 20 250 babies born to teenage mothers aged 10 to 19, according to the Gauteng MEC in a response to a question in the Gauteng Legislature; 2976 pregnancies were terminated. From the start of the year to August, 118 babies were abandoned in public hospitals, some of them likely by teenage mothers.
A preliminary understanding of the impact of the pandemic on teen pregnancies can be seen through data from the annual District Health Barometer (DHB) report, which shows the number of deliveries recorded in public health facilities.
An increase in teenage births of 28% when comparing births to teenage mothers in Gauteng reported in the DBH for 2019/2020 with the Gauteng health department’s number,
The Gauteng health department also provided a monthly breakdown of the teenage deliveries from April 2020 to March 2021. The months with the highest number of deliveries were May, June, July and August: most of these teenage mothers would have fallen pregnant before COVID hit South Africa.
In the early stages of the COVID pandemic, schools were closed on 18 March 2020, with the hard lockdown starting on 26 March, meaning that pregnancies from that time would be delivered around December 2020, which would likely not be reflected in the DBH for 2019/2020.
Catherine Mathews, director in the Health Systems Research Unit of the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC) said it would take time to assess the full impact school closures had on teen pregnancies.
“We do know that schools can be an important, safe, protective environment for girls, and when schools close, children are often left unsupervised and can be more at risk of sexual violence.”
Contraception has not been readily available to girls and women, with the District Health Barometer 2019/20 noting persistent stock-outs of contraception have been reported since 2018.
The SAMRC surveyed adolescent girls, aged 15 to 24, between 1 December 2020 and 28 February 2021, to find out how they were affected by the pandemic. The Outlier looked at the results for the 15 to 19 age group. Out of the 264 participants in this age group, 23.5% stated that they were unable to obtain contraceptives, while 18.8% reported challenges in accessing condoms due to the pandemic.
But, to connect the increase in teen pregnancies to the inaccessibility of condoms and contraception alone would be to assume that the 23 226 pregnancies were a product of consensual sex, when that may not always have been the case.
Mathews said: “Violence against women and girls in the country is so pervasive in South Africa and we can’t ignore its impact on teenage pregnancy.”
The MEC Mokgethi said, “Cases of statutory rape are reported by healthcare social workers at hospitals and clinics to the Department of Social Development and SAPS,” adding that no cases of statutory rape were collected by the health department.
Data for 2020/21 for the other eight provinces are not available, so it hasn’t been possible to see if this trend is reflected there,
However, the province with the highest percentage of teenagers of mothers giving birth is the Northern Cape at 18% in 2019/20. The Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal follow with 16.7% and 16.4% respectively. Gauteng’s teenage birth rate was 7.5%, the lowest of the provinces.
According to World Bank data on births among women aged 15 to 19 years, South Africa’s 68 births per 1000 women was lower than other Sub-Saharan African countries, it remains higher than the world average of 42 births per 1000 women in that age group.
Source: The Outlier
