“Just say no” prevents teenage pregnancy the way ‘Have a nice day’ cures chronic depression."
Girls and by girls I mean females under 20. Grab your Blackberries, your Gucci shades, your Louis Vuitton and... Your baby.
Has having a baby become some sort of bizarre fashion statement? Has it strutted off the Red Carpet and into our communities? Is having a baby as desirable as having the latest cell phone or pair of to-die-for Nine Wests? According to an article I read in The Times, there’s no denying that there seems to be a baby pandemic sweeping through schools throughout South Africa, leaving 5000 Gauteng girls pregnant, the bulk of which are aged 17 to 19. In the Eastern Cape alone it’s estimated that a teenage girl falls pregnant almost every hour! And if this is happening at our schools, even after the government spends about R180 billion on educating our youngsters, what’s going on?
It’s not been long since I graced the Sex Ed classroom, listening to the teacher pile drive the seriousness (not to mention painfully embarrassing) consequences of engaging in unprotected sex into our sponge-like brains. At the end of the lesson there was no denying that my classmates and I felt the same way: Unprotected sex could easily equal unmentionable things growing on your private bits or worse, a baby! Granted teen pregnancy is in no way an invention of the 21 century. My mother had a baby when she was 17, however when I was 17 I didn’t know of anyone having babies and I went to a school where I was the only, uh, white girl in the glass. So in six years what’s changed?
In more recent times British girls started a trend of having babies to get a state-issued house and financial aid, allowing them to move out of home without the pressure of getting a job. And the more little people they produce, the more money they get. That kind of makes sense. However, this is definitely not the case in South Africa, where social aid can barely buy nappies. And if money isn’t the catalyst, then what’s prompting the procreation? The latter part of the last decade has seen phenomenal technological advances, leading to a change in our social and economic lifestyles - Facebook iApp anyone? It’s made us more modern, more progressive. And in our very progressive way of thinking, we’ve opted to give our children cell phones instead of bicycles and let them browse the internet because it’s viewed as some sort of educational super tool (obviously we’ve blocked the porn sites, we’re not stupid). This results in children having the world at their fingertips, and by world, I mean the world of social networks and gasp, the influential world of celebrities and fashion... The Bling Culture. Now if you have celebrities like Jessica Alba, Kate Hudson, Ashley Simpson, Kourtney Kardashian (Khloe’s still trying), Mirander Kerr and Victoria Beckham accessorising their Armani Prive with a baby bump, you’ll soon have thousands of teens wanting a mini-me too (and if you think about it, falling pregnant is free and relatively easy, unlike getting your hands on a Prada purse). Celebrities have turned babies from sweet, burping bundles of joy, into a trend, a must-have in your winter wardrobe. Obviously, this isn’t a bad thing, especially if you’re grossing a couple million dollars a year. But if you’re a 17-year-old girl, who lives in one of South Africa’s more impoverished areas, we might have a problem. And we have an even bigger problem because that girl is part of a group of girls in Soweto, who when asked why they insist on having babies replied: “Because it looks cool”! Yet this is not just a Soweto-inspired way of thinking, it’s fashionable and as fashion goes, it knows geographic boundaries, it’s not prejudiced against colour nor does it have cultural preference. And like a fashion paradigm, this baby fashion faux pas is destined to become “Like so last year” but unlike last season’s died skinny jeans you can’t just get rid of it, well not for the next 18 years at least.
So how do we fix this? We could follow in the footsteps of a North Carolina University, where they’ve developed an enrolment programme which pays its female students a dollar a day, that’s $365 a year, not to have a baby. Brilliant! Perhaps we could reverse the misconceptions of early parenthood by our fashion-forward youth, if we took the portion of the education budget allocated for Sex Ed and a started a No Baby Reward Scheme. For every year they remain childless they get a designer bag. Or a Blackberry. Or front row seats, for them and their childless posse, at the Johannesburg Fashion Week.
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