Garth Rattray

OUR SOCIETY is hypocritical. It presents our impressionable youth with double standards, mixed messages and cultural confusion. Popular songs promulgate lasciviousness and cheapen females, yet we expect our children to avoid sexual intercourse when everything around them validates the act. Newspapers constantly print sex-laden stories, photographs and scenes of carnival revellers gyrating (more than) half-nakedly while performing 'dance sex'. Cable television delivers sexually provocative music videos and triple-X movies. Sex is used to sell just about everything.

Even a movie advertisement for scholastic (CXC) assistance ends with the teenage schoolboy frolicking with a teenage schoolgirl- suggestive of a 'reward' for academic improvement. Preaching abstention, lecturing on safe sex and making laws won't matter much until our society makes the cultural shift away from materialism and a preoccupation with sexuality. Underage girls will continue having sexual intercourse and some will (of course) become pregnant.

Babyfather gunmen

When health care workers are forced to report pregnant teenage girls to the authorities (the police), serious problems will ensue. Some colleagues (especially those seeing inner-city residents) have expressed concern about retributions from babyfather gunmen. And, when mandatory reporting by 'prescribed persons' becomes common knowledge, pregnant minors (in illegal but consensual relationships) will do everything to avoid trouble for their babyfathers and family. The abortion rate will skyrocket. Many will die at the hands of butchers. Some may attempt to abort the pregnancies themselves and perhaps die trying.

We are going to scare pregnant teenagers away from essential antenatal care and put them and their unborn children at great risk for serious (sometimes fatal) complications that are much more common within their age group, such as severe anaemia, toxaemia, premature labour, placenta previa, intrauterine growth retardation and low birth weight. The maternal death rate for mothers ages 15 or younger is 60 per cent greater than that of women in their 20s.

Pregnant teens will go underground and turn up at the last minute for delivery. Without the benefit of blood screening procedures, vertical transmission of diseases like HIV/AIDS during birth will increase. Other diseases lurking within the birth canal will also affect the babies.

Ethical confidentiality rule

When it comes to teenage pregnancies, the new law supersedes our ethical confiden-tiality rule. We may, therefore, now be seen merely as police informants. An entire generation of young mothers, their friends, family and acquaintances will lose confidence in the family doctor. This will eventually transcend issues of pregnancy and carry forward into future generations. The traditional image of the trusted family doctor/confidant/friend/counsellor will be destroyed.

I agree that underage teenage pregnancies should be reported to the authorities but not by physicians from whom these young girls (and their unborn babies) need help one impacts the other, the Government should leave the medical issues to us and the social issues to social workers. In my opinion, the Government should legislate that health-care workers submit a list of underage pregnancies to an appropriate entity where social workers can document, investigate the circumstances of the pregnancy and report to the (yet to be created) 'registry'.

Instead of focusing on culpability and punishment, the Government should use the registry to effect much-needed social interventions and follow-up protection of our young mothers and children. We need social reconstruction, pre-emptive social programmes and constant monitoring of all our children. The disadvantages of using doctors to report underage pregnancies far outweigh the advantages. This law will end up risking the lives of the very people who it seeks to protect.

Next week: Pre-empt child abuse