Sweet 16 young mamas

Despite the sunny summer’s day, 16-year-old Moipone Modise (not her real name) wears her red fleece jacket zipped up as she waits in the queue for antenatal care patients at Alexandra’s 8th Avenue clinic. She is five months pregnant. Each Tuesday and Thursday, the clinic offers the full range of antenatal services to expectant mothers from the township.

Modise, who completed grade 10 last year, is open and upfront about her pregnancy. ‘We were using Lovers Plus and it burst,” she says. ‘By the time I realised that I might get pregnant, I was only left with three hours to take the morning-after pill and my time expired at 3am.”

At the time, Modise, who is HIV negative, considered getting an abortion, but was dissuaded by her mother.

She is the only teenager out of several interviewed by the Mail & Guardian to claim to have used condoms consistently. She is also among the few who believe that the child-support grant has become a perverse incentive for teenage girls to get pregnant. ‘I’ve known some of the girls here since I was young and now all of a sudden, ‘Ke na le [I’ve got the] grant and it helps me here and there’. Ba re [They say] ‘I’m budgeting’.

‘Budgeting ka [with the] grant? Okay!” she exclaims rhetorically.

Modise, who has attended a semi-private school and who has a supportive mother she can count on financially, is an exception among the other interviewees. Her boyfriend is more or less her age, having completed matric last year. Her mother, a lesbian who recently married her partner, plans to adopt the baby should her artificial insemination be unsuccessful. Modise does not plan on applying for the child-support grant and believes it is responsible for increasing the number of pregnant teenagers.

Most of her peers, however, rely on the grant for their babies’ welfare or, like Nontobeko Mntambo, a pregnant 18-year-old whom we met at Tshepisong Clinic near Krugersdorp, are using it to supplement their children’s father’s contributions. ‘I will apply for the grant so that it’s not just the dad [supporting],” she reasons. ‘If he loses his job, what will I do?”

Mntambo, who did not enrol for grade 11 this year at her school in Meadowlands, says her boyfriend, who is 10 years older than she is, owns a hair salon and also holds down a nine-to-five job in Johannesburg. She did not use contraceptives because they ‘trusted” each other. ‘He wanted the baby, I didn’t, but I knew it [the pregnancy] would happen,” she proffers casually.

Sepati Mabalane (not her real name) was 17 when she fell pregnant in 2003, while doing grade 10. A subsequent pregnancy prevented her from returning to school in 2005. ‘Ke ne ke le dom ganyana [I was a bit naive] and the guy was older than me,” she says of having unprotected sex. Her first grant application, she says, was processed within four months in 2005, but she has given up on her second one after experiencing undue delays.

According to the South African Social Security Agency (Sassa), there were 28 327 mothers under 18 registered for the child-support grant at the end of 2006. In 2003, the figure was 15 599.

The number of teen mothers could actually be higher, according to Childline, but is not reflected in the Sassa statistics because often the pregnant girl’s parents, who are the primary care-givers, register for the grant.

The rise in grant users has been concurrent with a rise in teenage pregnancy figures in two of the country’s most populous provinces. Gauteng department of education statistics collected by the Education Management Information System reflected a definite upward surge in schoolgirl pregnancy, with the number surging from 1 388 in 2003 to 2 336 in 2006.

Although provincial figures in KwaZulu-Natal have been difficult to collate because of the province’s size, a survey conducted in 120 schools showed that 727 schoolgirls fell pregnant in 2005 compared to 632 in 2004 in the same schools.

David Harrison of loveLife believes that it is only adults, who often have no insight into the motivations of teenagers, who believe that the child-support grant is fuelling teenage pregnancy rates. ‘Nurses and teachers often say the grant has had a negative impact on young people. But information from the department of social development, which has been quoted quite a bit, shows that the lag between birth and getting the grant discourages mothers to look at it [the grant] that way.”

Harrison added that the child-support grant was valuable in curbing the spread of Aids as it made young girls more financially independent and less reliant on older men.

But, condom use among young people remains worryingly low. A 2003 Reproductive Health Research Unit survey conducted on behalf of loveLife revealed that only 52% of teenagers aged between 15 and 19 used condoms during their last sexual encounter. Even more concerning is that 36% of youth aged between 15 and 24 felt they were not at risk of contracting HIV.

Catherine Macphail, a senior researcher who worked on the survey in which 12 000 youths were interviewed, says: ‘The prevalence of teenage pregnancy shows that we are not getting through to a lot of young people.”

Schools are still not sure what to do with pregnant pupils. According to Lunga Ngqengelele, the ministerial spokesperson for the department of education, the department’s guidelines on handling teenage pregnancy will be published in the next few weeks. ‘In light of recent reports [about the spike in figures], the matter is quite urgent,” says Ngqengelele. ‘The department has forwarded the guidelines to [Minister Naledi Pandor] and she is applying her mind to them. The fact is that no child can be denied access to education.”