In for a baby, in for a social grant

Early this year news reports cited “research” showing South African teens are deliberately falling pregnant in order to access social grants.

What utter bollocks.

I am not an advocate of teenage pregnancy; in fact I am vehemently against it as it interrupts a child’s life and interferes with her chances of a successful future. In rural areas (where the news reports claime there were 123 teen pregnant in one town in 2010 and 53 in Nkandla) children are faced with more challenges than those of children in urban areas. I’ll venture insofar as to say that if there are indeed children deliberately falling pregnant to access the social grant, it would likely be teens in urban areas more than those in rural areas.

The first challenge a rural teen faces is the traditional taboo attitude towards dating and socialising with boys that is common in rural areas. Parents zealously (sometimes enforcing their rules with a cane, a belt or sjambok) oppose their teenagers having boyfriends. These children are then forced to hide that they are dating because NOT dating is not an option. They’re teenagers for crying out loud!

Because of this skulking and hiding the teen is then alone in her relationship, often at the mercy of the advice of her friends and feels alienated from her parents who become Enemy No 1, it’s psychology 101, "a no-brainer" as the kids would say.

The second challenge these teens face is that while they are fully aware of contraceptives and condoms, they often do not use both. Kids I have spoken to would like to use contraceptives but the nurses in the clinics refuse them the service even though many of them go when they are 15 or 16 years old. The problem these teens face is that the nurses, instead of doing their jobs, are being proxy parents and deciding that if they give a teen contraception it is as good as cheering them on to have sex. A child who has decided to have sex will have sex, no matter the fear-mongering or beatings. And so they go without contraceptives.

As for condoms, the teens, raised in predominantly patriarchal households where their father’s word is law, even if the father is working in the city and is not home, are susceptible to their boyfriends’ will. The mantra of many black men is that a “real man” doesn’t wear a condom. They protest with a litany of excuses, including:
* The condom is too small (a problem that only seem to befall black men, *snort*)
* The condom smells funny,therby making sex nuaseating (as if it wasn't already ;))
* They are allergic to the lubricant
* Only a girl who knows they have AIDS would want to use a condom
* If you love/trust me you won’t use a condom

When the girl feebly raises the issue of pregnancy, he assures her that he will “pull out” in time. She believes him and takes her chance. The ploys used by black men in order to avoid using a condom are the same ploys that adult women fall for, what are the chances that a teen will be able to resist? How come women in their 30s aren’t condemned for unsafe sexual practices? Despite the arguments to the contrary, mature unemployed, unmarried, women also fall pregnant without planning to should be subject to the same scrutiny teens are in terms of whether or not they are opportunistically falling pregnant because they would also like to milk the state coffers dry, much like the leaders who condemn them for it do.

Although state clinics ought to provide the “morning after” pill I have yet to come across one that stocks it. If clinics do stock the pills the nursing staff of Harding and its surrounds has taken it upon itself to not provide them. So much so that teens stopped asking for it.

When a teen seeks to correct her “stupidly falling pregnant” circumstance by requesting a termination of pregnancy from a state hospital as she is legally allowed to the nurses refuse her the service because of their personal beliefs. I know of a child who was closeted in a room by seven nurses, all about the age of her mother and severely berated for even thinking about an abortion. I myself have an experience in which a doctor in a public hospital refused a cousin on mine an abortion merely because she disagreed with the reasons given for wanting one.

So there is a teen in a rural area, stuck with a pregnancy and without an out, why should she not make use of the state provided social grant in order to help raise this child? Sometimes the teen is still a recipient of a social grant herself. I would like to meet a person who has raised a child on R250 a month in this day and age - only that person can convince me gettting its possible to fall pregnant merely to secure R250 for 18 years of a child's life.

Does this research conclude that the teens then use the money for their personal needs, like maybe a sexy top to seduce old men in? Because that is the implication of the allegation that teens are falling pregnant on purpose. Who then provides for this new infant? Certainly not the poor family a rural teen often comes from. The teen’s schooling is interrupted and sometimes she may never go back to school because there is no one to take care of the baby. Is this research suggesting that teens are choosing this path for themselves? Is this research saying that teens would rather earn R250 per child for the rest of their lives? Is that the best that this country has created for children to aspire to?

I Gave Him HIV; He Asked For It

She sits with her stomach protruding proudly, stretching the worn material of her tube top. One of her eyes is crinkled in a smoker’s squint, a cigarette dangling from her lips.

“I didn’t really want another baby, but it happened!” she laughs raucously. I wonder if she has also been drinking.

“I didn’t find out till it was too late because of the drugs I take, they mess up your period and make you fat you know?”

“Drugs?” I ask, unable to conceal my shock. She’s smoking, taking drugs and possibly drinking while she was pregnant?

She laughs her outrageous laugh again and explains, “ARVs sisi. I’ve been on them for a year now.”

“So your boyfriend knows you’re HIV-positive? Is he also positive?”

“Well NOW he is. I don’t know about before but when I told him I was positive he said he was a real man, refused to use a condom.”

I look stupefied.

“Don’t look so shocked, so many men think you’re joking here if you are straight with them and tell them you’re positive. I’m not going to stop having sex just because they’re stupid.”

She is serious. She belongs to a group of friends who make no bones about being HIV-positive. They say; “It’s just like diabetes or cancer; you just have to take care of yourself.” I applaud them this mentality, in a world where many people still view being diagnosed HIV-positive is a “death sentence” they are amazingly forward-thinking.

All of them have been aware of their positive status for over five years. All of them are on the state ART (anti-retroviral treatment) programme. All of them are alcoholics. All of them have transitional sex.

They claim they tell their prey that they have HIV. They claim most of the men they sleep with refuse to wear condoms stating various reasons including;

-          Real men don’t wear condoms

-          Doesn’t she trust him?

-          Doesn’t the woman trust herself?

-          You’re just saying you’re positive because you want you avoid pregnancy, I’ll ejaculate “outside”.

-          I don’t enjoy it with a condom.

-          I’m too big for a condom.

-          I have HIV too so what does it matter?

-          I’m allergic to the lubricant on government condoms.

-          I can’t “feel” you when I wear a condom.

As these women talk to me, laughing all the while at my stupefied facial expressions, they almost convince me that the men who get infected by these women deserve their just desserts for their stupidity. I ask why don’t the women protect themselves from re-infection?

*explosions of mocking laughter*

Am I serious? If they tried to protect themselves by wearing female condoms (assuming they manage to find some as they claim female condoms are almost the Holy Grail) then the men would stop sleeping with them. Then they would have no alcohol, no places to sleep, no food, no sex no fun. The cycle is vicious. I cannot bear to listen to any more.

“The good thing about the father of this baby is that he is a TEACHER! So he’s rich!” the lively pregnant one laughs gleefully and lights up.

Grabbing the packet (mine) from which she has been pilfering day I make a beeline for a place where such madness is not so normal.

Gifting with HIV

Coleen* is a 24-year-old high school dropout who discovered she was HIV-positive when she fell pregnant in 2006. Her child suffered asphyxia and died at 10-weeks old; it was a baby girl. Coleen was devastated; she had been craving a child of her since her sister gave birth to a bouncing baby boy.

I believe that the loss of a child could lead a mother to be irrational in her grief. It is because this belief that I can perhaps excuse and even forgive how Coleen went out to find the next man she could trick into impregnating her.

You see, upon the death of their child, her boyfriend had promptly dumped her and taken a wife. This new wife was everything Colleen wasn’t, she was a big African woman with curves in all the right places, in the little village they all lived in, being fat meant you clearly did not have AIDS and could bear him many sons. Coleen’s figure could (and still can) put a runway models to shame although she was slightly short for that career path.

Coleen did find a man to impregnate her, but she never told him that she was HIV-positive and in 2008 she was spotting a new bump and very much in love with the new man. This did not stop her having very public and embarrassing slanging matches with the wife of her ex lover. When this woman failed to conceive the sons her husband had anticipated he kicked her to the curb which only served to make Coleen even more unpleasant and spiteful.

Maybe she hoped that her ex lover would take her back and marry her since she had demonstrated that she could have children. But the man took another woman, a bigger version of his first. At the age of 23, this young man has had two wives.

I say I could forgive Coleen going and purposefully infecting another person, perhaps one who didn’t already have HIV because she was riddled with grief and is not the smartest person I know. She didn’t drop out of school because she was lazy after all; she dropped out because she just could not get past the 10th Grade.

A woman who loses a child would do anything to have her back. She is wounded more deeply than any other wound known to mankind. Hands used to cuddling the squirming warmth of her child, gurgling nonsensically while the purest form of love cascades through her like a live fire, are suddenly barren. Left clutching only the reminders; the fluffy toy, the rattle and the clothes she will never outgrow. Bereft. For Coleen, the hole could only be filled with another child, HIV be damned.

And so she gave birth to another adorable baby girl; she heeded the rules the hospital had set out – only breastfeed or only bottle feed for the first six month if you want your child to stand a chance against infection. She breastfed her baby who grew cuter by the day and when this child’s father did a bunk Coleen did not despair, she had what she wanted, an adorable baby of her very own. Even Coleen’s worst critics, for in a village everyone knows everyone else’s business, started to mellow and overlook that she had infected someone with HIV.

But with the birth of a normal baby girl also came Coleen’s healing. She now could live fully again; and this meant date of course. Her first victim, cleverly seduced, was her ex lover, just to make sure he was indeed infected with HIV she began to sleep with him again; inviting him to her bed, often with the baby sleeping soundly next to them. At the local communal water tap she was heard to boast, “I have taught his wife a lesson she’ll never forget,’ to awed audiences who went home to further discuss this and hope she got her comeuppance. But otherwise do nothing.

She then began yet another relationship with three other men (if her wagging tongue at funeral vigils while villagers await the priest and need a good story to chase away the chill is to be believed) and finally one man won her heart. And her HIV. And the title of her third child

I do not judge Coleen, I believe that the men she may or may not have infected also had a responsibility to protect themselves. They did not know this woman and displayed the same ignorance and carelessness that has allowed HIV/AIDS to ravage our continent unabated. But she knew and she did nothing. For her own selfish reasons she continued to have unprotected sex and produce children, who in all probability will end up either dead or orphans. That is saddening.

And more frightening is that Coleen is not the only one who does this.

*not her real name.