The Teddy Bear Clinic has urged the South African government to declare teenage pregnancy a pandemic.

Development Diaries reports that this comes after the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Health said there have been 26,515 teen pregnancies in the province in the last eight months, with the youngest being ten years old.

Clinical Director at the non-governmental organisation (NGO), Shaheda Omar, stated that teenage pregnancy is both alarming and disheartening because it changes the trajectory of the child’s life and the newborn.

Omar added that children and newborns are being robbed of opportunities that will have long-term physical and psychological effects on their lives.

Also, a member of the KwaZulu-Natal Department, Nomagugu Simelane, urged parents to get more involved in their children’s lives because the current stats are a disgrace.

‘This is not [only] a government disgrace, but a disgrace, parents, for us, as the black nation, because such things are only happening in the black community’, Briefly News quoted Simelane as saying.

Simelane also addressed parents of boys and men, stating that they should not celebrate when they see their sons bringing home girls in school uniform.

She added that 17-year-old boys have no business being in sexual relationships with 13-year-old girls.

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), in a 2021 report, said an estimated 49 million sexually active women in East and Southern Africa did not have access to modern contraception or family planning services, and more than half of these were young women.

As a result of this, adolescent pregnancy rates in the region are twice the global average at 92 births per 1,000 girls.

Photo source: UNFPA