The year is 1974. The apartheid State has just set up its free family planning programme, with one of its explicit aims to curb the population growth rate among blacks. Among other methods, the state encourages the coercive use of the injectable contraceptive Depo Provera among young black women studying for matric and black women working in factories.
The year is now 2004. Mobile clinics continue to provide free contraceptives to females at schools and elsewhere, mostly of the injectable kind. As quoted in Thabo Mohlala’s page 2 story, health workers consider it to be in the best interests of girl-learners to inject them with contraceptives — some as young as 12 — with or without their parents’ consent.
The family planning approaches under apartheid and now may have very different underlying motives. But the parallel between the two eras that strikes me as particularly reprehensible is singling out women and girls as the ‘problem†— these days, for social issues such as sexual violence and teenage pregnancy.
The 12-year-old girl in Mohlala’s story says she was told by a nurse that the contraceptive injection was for her own protection against unforeseen events like rape.
This is the crux of the issue: the solution being offered here to girls who are vulnerable to sexual violence in no way tackles the massive underlying social problems that are responsible for sexual violence in the first place. Where are the concerted and effective programmes to change fundamentally male attitudes so that sexually abusing females is clearly understood as a brutal aberration, not as an unfortunate norm?
Here’s a quote to make your blood run cold, from a 2001 progress report on laws and policies affecting women’s reproductive rights: ‘Considered as their greatest fear, most [South African] girls expected to be raped at some time in their lives.â€
And the best our teachers and health workers can do to protect these girls is to give them a contraceptive injection.
Another side of the issue that is so disturbing is that there is such a deafening silence about the other half of the teenage-
pregnancy equation: the boys. Once again, where are the efforts to educate boys about the responsibilities associated with sexual intimacy? Where is the widespread access to barrier methods of contraception like condoms?
It is no mystery that females under the age of 20 exhibit the highest increase in HIV infection of all groups.
And, if they manage to avoid being infected with HIV or other sexually tranmitted diseases, it is also no surprise that so many women will continue to raise their offspring as single mothers while fathers opt out of their responsibilities.
The Population Policy (1998) may recognise that ‘government-imposed and -driven fertility control measures are not reconcilable within freedom of choice and human rightsâ€. It may also stress the importance of reducing violence against females and promoting equal participation of men and women in all areas of family — including ‘responsible parenthood, reproductive health, child-rearing and household workâ€.
But I hold out little hope of seeing this happen in my lifetime.