10-year-old moms

In 2017, about 2,000 of the 196,409 teenage pregnancies nationwide involved girls aged 10 to 14.

For me, this was the most striking aspect of the government report on teenage pregnancies, which was presented recently at a first-ever multi-stakeholder summit on the problem.

In grade school I had classmates who began menstruating at nine years old. We could easily tell when this happened: their bodies began filling out in places where it wouldn’t be possible for those who were not yet women.

And the boys in puberty began gravitating toward the early bloomers. Maybe humans are like dogs, emitting sexual pheromones when we’re ready for propagation of the race, and the boys can smell the readiness. The male dogs in the neighborhood go wild when female dogs in heat pass by.

One downside of puberty: the young women started having oily skin and pimples. But womanhood is generally becoming; the girls bloomed, and they had the cool aura of kids exploring taboo subjects such as sex.

In those days when Macintosh apples were just fruits and the web was something spun by spiders, kids learned about sex through popular culture – movies (both foreign and local), rock ’n’ roll music and articles, Playboy, Hustler, and those tiny booklets of hardcore porn with grainy pictures openly sold along the sidewalks of C.M. Recto and the pre-LRT Avenida Rizal.  

So yes, teenagers were frisky even back then. I think kids have always explored sex even during the days of Maria Clara, when Filipinos put a premium on women’s virginity before marriage.

Officials of the Commission on Population say they are not aware of studies on whether female virginity is still as highly prized in 21st century Philippines. Popcom officials, however, say there are studies indicating less importance placed on marriage by younger generations of Filipinos.

A study conducted by the Department of Science and Technology showed that on average, girls in this country have their first boyfriend at age 15. I think this was also true in my youth.

But girls getting pregnant at 10? I feel like an old-fashioned grandmother; I am shocked. That’s not even teenage pregnancy; it’s childhood pregnancy.

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Our health and economic officials aren’t just shocked, they are alarmed enough to call the problem of teenage pregnancies a “national social emergency.”

Socioeconomic Planning Undersecretary Juan Antonio Perez, who is also Popcom director, says on average, 24 babies are born every hour to teenage moms in our country, or over 530 a day. This is based on pregnancies in 2017 among girls aged 10 to 19 recorded by the Department of Health and collated by Popcom.

This means teenagers account for about a tenth of the approximately two million babies born each year in our country. Perez compares this to the average annual addition of 200,000 to the national population in Thailand.

And a number of the young mothers bear more children before their teenage years are over, Perez noted when he faced “The Chiefs” this week on Cignal TV’s One News.

What does this mean? Since most of the teenage moms come from the poorest households, they are unlikely to have nannies. Their own mothers will have to attend to other household chores, and may even be the main breadwinners. So the teenage moms themselves must take care of their own babies – meaning they must drop out of school, and they have acutely limited means of earning a living.

The 2017 Annual Poverty Indicator Survey indicated that of the 57 percent of female students who were forced to drop out of school, “family matters” trounced even education expenses as the main reason, with teenage pregnancy and early marriage reported as the biggest components.

If they have more pregnancies, the disruption in their formal education could become permanent. The limited education in turn will severely impair their earning capacity in adulthood.

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A parallel problem that Popcom has not tracked is the number of teenagers who abort their pregnancies, or try to.

I know girls who have used the hooked wires of clothes hangers, drank infusions from herbs sold around churches (marketed to induce menstruation), and even jumped down from coconut trees to end their pregnancies. Some of them landed in the hospital due to life-threatening infections.

In my high school and college years, girls exchanged notes on the rhythm method and, when that didn’t work, swapped the addresses of abortionists.

I can’t recall anyone who used the pill. Either the girls were too scared to consult doctors, or doctors refused to give birth control advice to teens.

As for the boys, my female classmates had one common complaint: they didn’t like using rubbers, and they placed nearly the entire burden of preventing pregnancies on the girls.

That didn’t stop the teenagers from exploring their anatomies. This comes naturally to humans, I think, as soon as hormones kick in. So it would be better if the kids get proper information on sex and their reproductive systems early.

It’s doubtful that sex education would encourage teenage promiscuity. Porn from soft to hardcore and all sorts of perversions can be accessed easily these days even on smartphones.

Sex education in schools, on the other hand, would be based on scientific and public health sources. So young girls can stop believing, as Perez cited as an example on The Chiefs, that they can’t get pregnant if they jump up and down after intercourse to dislodge sperm.

The “national social emergency,” according to Perez, means getting several agencies particularly local government units on board to discourage teenage pregnancies, assist teenage moms, and fully implement the reproductive health law.

It’s been seven years since the enactment of the RH law, but it has yet to be fully implemented. Perhaps the urgency of preventing teenage pregnancies will give the law an additional boost. This is about securing the future for our youths.