By Carolina Vásquez Araya on September 5, 2021
photo: Bill Hackwell
One of the most devastating consequences of the helplessness of girls in our countries is early motherhood. In Guatemala, for example, the number of pregnancies and births at an early age is frightening. According to one of the institutions dedicated to monitoring this issue – the Observatory on Sexual and Reproductive Health, OSAR – there were 57,500 seventy-eight pregnancies in girls and adolescents between 10 and 18 years of age during the first half of 2021 (this out of Guatemala’s population of a little over 16 million people).
Among them, about 3 thousand correspond to girls aged 10 to 14 years. That is, a period in which a girl has not yet fully developed her body and when a pregnancy poses a high risk.
In addition to the violence implicit in rape and its physical and psychological consequences, a pregnancy at this early age means the loss of rights at all levels and submission to a harsh, restrictive lifestyle, subject to the authority of the adults around her. To this is added the legal prohibition to interrupt the gestation process, even in the case of a being whose body does not meet the conditions to support it and carry it to term. In other words, the law condemns the victim based on a vision of law influenced by religious doctrines and a well-established patriarchal system.
Seen as a normal part of life, pregnancy in girls and adolescents is one of the most serious consequences of the marginalization in which a large part of the female population lives and develops. Besieged by a patriarchal concept of life and duty, thousands of girls end up being victims of sexual abuse from before they reach puberty, becoming mothers so early in their development that they even lose their lives in the process. Helpless under the pressure of the authoritarianism exercised by fathers, brothers and other men in their environment, added to the lack of protection from the rest of the community, the girl-mothers end up exhausting the stage of childhood without having lived it, to face the harsh reality of an existence of misery.
Faced with this situation, derived from absolutely flawed cultural patterns, girls are forced to drag the humiliation of an unwanted, unconsented sexuality with serious repercussions for their physical and psychological health, in an environment of disrespect that denies them the right to experience the normal stages of their development.
In these scenarios, girl-mothers do not enter into the authorities’ attention priorities. They see cases of early pregnancy as just another expression of underdevelopment and not as the criminal acts of sexual abuse that they really are. The message sent by this approach to the problem is one of conformism in the face of the subjugation of one of the social groups least taken into account in the public policies of governments.
Those thousands of girls and adolescents whose poorly nourished and weak bodies can barely carry the weight of their own existence, give birth in miserable conditions, amidst the indifference of the authorities and enduring the rejection of their own families. Such is their life, such is the social environment and such is the result of a culture that condemns them to eternal underdevelopment.
This abuse has been an inveterate habit for generations, deeply rooted and considered a socially acceptable practice; an unavoidable destiny for those who still do not have the strength or the protection of the law to defend their rights.
Girls deserve to achieve their dreams. Early motherhood is not one of them.
Source: telesur, translation, Resumen Latinoamericano