Teen pregnancy is a moral issue
TO BE a virgin or not to be one. It’s a question many teenage girls find easier to answer than their exam papers.
Teenage pregnancy is a serious problem in our country. Schoolgirls fall pregnant, placing a heavy burden on the state and taxpayers. Besides the financial implications, there are the social and cultural implications. Schooling is disrupted and many girls don’t go back to school. Babies don’t know their fathers and invariably become the responsibility of the grandmothers.
The decision by the uThukela District Municipality to award “maiden” bursaries to 16 matriculants on condition they undergo virginity tests to prove their purity has pitted traditionalists against modern-day sexual health experts and gender activists.
The experts claim the tests amount to sexual abuse and a violation of the women’s rights. Traditionalists disagree, saying westerners do not understand Zulu culture in which a woman only has sex with a man after lobolo has been paid and they are married.
Despite the criticism, uThukela mayor Dudu Mazibuko has stuck to her guns over the controversial decision.
The “bursaries were not a reward, but a lifelong investment” in the girl’s life, she said.
ANC Western Cape parliamentarian, Nonceba Mhlauli, presented an elaborate response (“Virginity testing is oppressive”, Cape Argus, January 27). She argued that there was no scientific basis for these tests and said studies had shown that the women were subjected to humiliation, ridicule, abuse, etc. But she gave no details of these studies. While she conceded that rape and teenage pregnancy are serious social issues, her thinking is muddled and, in typical ANC manner, shifts the blame to tradition and patriarchy. (How could she when Zulu culture frowns on girls engaging in premarital sex?)
It’s not the ANC’s liberalised education and the dysfunctional school system but culture and patriarchy. It’s not the corrosive influence of the West and condoms but virginity testing that is to blame.
But if you empower little children before instilling respect for authority, order, discipline and good moral value, what can you expect?
Even though it’s controversial, we should applaud, not condemn, the uThukela District Municipality for taking a stand against the moral degradation of culture.
In a promiscuous society where sex has been cheapened to a mere sales item and virginity has lost its value; which is more shameful and oppressive: virginity testing or 90 000 school girls falling pregnant every year?
The problem really is that we have discarded old-fashioned cultural and moral values and embraced Western culture indiscriminately. Shifting the blame is not only a distortion but a perversion of the truth. T MARKANDAN Silverglen