BY ALICE AWUOR
Last month the world marked the World Contraception Day with a lot of pomp and flair, only to settle back this month into old patterns of stigmatizing young women, especially adolescent girls, who want to access contraception.
Adolescent girls in my home county of Migori continue to experience shame and fear when trying to access contraception information and services from local healthcare providers.
This is despite the existence of active laws and policies that permit and direct public health providers to avail contraception to adolescent girls.
These policies include the 2014 Adolescents Package of Care, which recognizes that adolescents are medically eligible to use any method of contraception and must have access to a variety of contraceptive choices.
The 2015 National Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health Policy further recognizes that as part of reducing early pregnancies, the policy shall ‘Enhance existing service provision channels to provide accurate information and services on a wide range of contraceptive methods to capture diverse needs of adolescents.’
In my community, contraceptives are often seen as the bridge and a major cause of promiscuity, barrenness and immorality, which means many parents cannot even discuss the topic with their sexually active children.
Major religious denominations also discourage the use of contraceptives and this influence is also seen in schools whereby the topic of contraception use among adolescents’ girls is left out when talking about teen pregnancy prevention.
During a recent Focus Group Discussion in Migori County, a mother of adolescents boldly said she cannot take her sexually active adolescent daughter to the clinic to adopt contraception because she believed that Family Planning should never be given to anyone who has never given birth.
Adolescent girls in a follow up discussion revealed that accessing contraceptive information and services often feels confusing and overwhelming because of unclear support from their guardians as well as service providers.
Migori County has experienced a remarkable access and utilization of contraceptives and this has contributed to a huge reduction of adolescent’s pregnancy from 37% in 2016 to 20.8% in 2021.
This shows that when we create an enabling environment for contraceptive information and services for adolescents, the uptake will increase and this huge global public health concern of teen pregnancy will be reduced.
Ms Awuor is a Migori-based youth advocate at the Network for Adolescent and Youth of Africa (NAYA)
