How opposition of teens’ reproductive services is causing harm and death

The legal requirement for parental consent for teenage girls to get sexual reproductive services, including sexual education, is unreasonable and violates their rights, human rights organisations have said.

They say the reproductive health system is characterised by major disparities, such as prejudiced legislation, limited knowledge and inadequate comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services.

At worst, many uninformed teens get pregnant, drop out of school, are robbed of their future and are ostracised because their parents forbade comprehensive health education. Some seek unsafe abortions.

The push for comprehensive reproductive health education in schools’ curriculum has been controversial.

Faith leaders have opposed it, saying far-left activists are trying to impose an excessively permissive social order.

The clerics and conservative voices argue that eliminating parental participation in their childrens’ reproductive health through giving consent would erode society’s moral fabric.

Promiscuity by adults is far from uncommon, and well-known unmarried women and men publicly boast of their liaisons.

Yet many parents who themselves are sexually unfaithful often refuse to let their daughters know how their reproductive systems work, how not to get pregnant and how to avoid sexually transmitted infections.

According to the report, those particularly affected, or victimised, are under age 21, persons with disability, people living with HIV, sex workers, gay men, transgender people, people who inject drugs – and heterosexual people.

The rights groups’ complaint is contained in the report to the United Nations ahead of the fourth cycle of the Universal Peer Review Mechanism next month.

In particular, the lobbies take issue with the National Reproductive Health Policy 2022-32, Section 3.4, which they say “excludes particularly young women and girls below the age of 21 from accessing or receiving critical reproductive health care services or information...”

This section “imposes unreasonable requirements on parental consent before the provision of reproductive health services, thus imposing additional barriers for adolescents and young people attaining the highest standard of health”.

To build their case, conservatives cite liberals targeting young people, especially teenage women with more sexual enlightenment, which showed more young people are getting much earlier sexual exposure today than in the past.

The survey showed that young men aged 15 to 24 had their first sexual experience before the age of 15.

This was similar to the KDHS 2022 report indicating eight per cent of women and 19 per cent of men aged 15 to 24 first had sexual intercourse before age 15.

KDHS 2022 said the percentage of women aged 15 to 19 who have ever been pregnant increased with age, from three per cent among those aged 15 to 31.

The rights group said the requirement of parental consent is particularly harmful to sex workers, gay men and transgender people.

“They have inequitable access to safe, effective, and quality HIV services and face disproportionate levels of stigma, discrimination, violence, human rights violations, and criminalisation.”