Contraceptives only a quick fix, won’t curb teenage pregnancies
The Kenya Demographic Health Survey 2019 indicates that one in every five adolescent girls either has a baby or is pregnant with her first child.
What you need to know:
- Although our aim is reducing teenage pregnancy, we will not solve the cause.
- We would be paving the way for an unprecedented marital crisis.
On Monday, my colleague Nicholas Kiplangat of Maseno University published an article in this forum titled ‘Curriculum should be reviewed to include sex education’.
In the piece, Nicholas proposes that sex education be introduced in the Competency-Based Curriculum and goes ahead to mourn Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development’s refusal to do so.
He argues that while pornographic content, sadly widely available, teaches the vice, sex education will teach good values. So far, his essay looks reasonable, but is it?
“Sex education” is a euphemism — a terminology meant to sound good but whose meaning is the exact opposite.
Nicholas points out that advocacy groups proposed a sex education curriculum to KICD.
Very likely, it was some version of Comprehensive Sex Education (CSE) that has always attracted adverse reactions from the Church and other moral purists.
These critics have long exposed the hoax that CSE is. The truth is that CSE,has these three principles, among others:
The first is that sex education should be morally neutral; no right and wrong talk. LGBTQ+ ideology will be taught to school-going children and, under this umbrella, immoral and unnatural behaviour will be presented as “okay”.
Minors will be taught that the pleasure of sex is due as a right to everyone, only that they should use contraceptives, or procure abortion if that fails.
Second, sex education should be explicit enough, hence they emphasize ‘knowledge, attitude, skills'. They insert ‘age-appropriate' to trick the naive. It is basically pornography openly taught and endorsed.
Third, sex education should be free from parental supervision. Children will be taught about their ‘rights to sex’, which parents have no right to interfere with.
Nicholas seems to endorse contraception. I do not. I believe contraception is wrong.
Fine. If we teach contraception to children, we implicitly endorse sexual activity. Although our aim is reducing teenage pregnancy, we will not solve the cause.
We would be paving the way for an unprecedented marital crisis. We should instead solve the root cause. Teenage pregnancies are a resulting problem, contraceptives only a seemingly quick fix, but one that instead fuels problems.
The root cause is, I think, the collapse of the moral fabric, the abandoning of our African and religious ideals. Sexuality has to take its rightful place among our values. We have to understand it anew, as a reality sacred, solemn and fit only for marriage.
Francis, 20, studies Quantity Surveying at the University of Nairobi
