It is events like the death of 17-year-old Nikacia Allen after her third Caesarean Section (C-section) in four years that bring forcefully home to us the fact that not only is society failing our children, but that our health and social/welfare systems suck. There is no way that Miss Allen is to blame for her own demise, but we should certainly be pointing fingers at her parent/s, teachers, community, the hospital, the social/welfare system and at ourselves.
Miss Allen’s oldest child is four years old, which means she would have given birth to that child at the age of 13. For those who have not made the nexus, a 13-year-old is a child who would have just completed Grade 7 (First Form) or Grade 8 (Second Form) depending on how old that child was at the time of writing the National Grade 6 Assessment examination.
A 13-year-old giving birth, more so by C-section, more than allows opportunity for investigation into her life and for charges to be laid where necessary. A crime, or maybe more than one, would have been committed. At the very least, the 13-year-old Miss Allen and her baby should not have been sent back to her North West District community until after she would have been counselled and given an opportunity to complete her secondary education and/or offered technical/vocational training.
Two years later Miss Allen, still a minor, was back in hospital giving birth to her second child also by way of C-section. Again—and there is no evidence to the contrary—she was quietly allowed to leave the hospital to return to an environment where apparently, no one cared about her. But the question that has to be asked here also is whether anyone in the health care system truly gives a damn. And the short answer would be “no.” Sadly, this has nothing to do with which political administration is or was in power and everything to do with the so-called professionals working at the hospital—the doctors, nurses and social workers, who seem to have some contagious and malignant form of cerebral myopia which eats away at their empathy and reduces their social conscience to shreds.
In January 2007, weeks after a 13-year-old city girl had given birth at the Georgetown Public Hospital—also by way of C-section—the then Medical Director had been asked whether the institution was not obligated to report to the police and social services, cases where girls under the age of 16 were preparing to give birth. His response was that there probably should be some system in place but that there was none. He admitted that all the Maternity Unit did was provide monthly statistics, which would show a breakdown of live births and the ages of the mothers among other things. It would seem that this data was sent to the Ministry of Health where it was used solely for reporting purposes.
The 13-year-old who had given birth in December 2006 was offered counselling and a chance to return to school, but only after her story hit the media when her baby was kidnapped by a woman pretending to be from an organisation offering assistance to the underage mother. The baby was found days later and the woman was subsequently charged and jailed for a year.
It would seem that nothing has changed eight years on. What else could explain Miss Allen’s three underage pregnancies? Surely her second C-section presentation called for drastic action, even if the first somehow had escaped the attention of the authorities.
Miss Allen’s mother, Patricia Allen, believes the hospital is to blame for her daughter’s demise. She pointedly ignores her role, as a parent, in the ongoing sexual abuse of her minor daughter. What, also, did her teachers do when their 13-year-old student dropped out to become a mother? What did the community do? Has there been any interventions at any level to prevent other teenage girls from following the same path? What have we, as a people, done to raise awareness about this issue and seek solutions? Have we marched, written letters or stood on a picket line? Are we a little concerned? Or not at all? How might we react if perchance it hit close to home?
When the 13-year-old gave birth in 2006, there were two other underage moms in the hospital with her—one was 11 and the other 14 years old.
Subsequent to that, there was a 12-year-old in 2012, who was raped, reportedly by her stepfather and gave birth via C-section; a 13-year-old who had to be air-dashed from Port Kaituma after she developed complications during delivery; a 13-year-old Wakapoa, Lower Pomeroon River girl who gave birth to twins at the Suddie Hospital; an 11-year-old who had been impregnated allegedly by her father; and a 12-year-old impregnated allegedly by her stepfather. These latter cases were all taken up by the Child Care and Protection Agency. But since we know that where there is smoke there is fire and it has been hinted that the problem of underage pregnancy is rampant in some areas, where is the proactive response?
The State of the World Population 2013 report said that Guyana had the second highest rate of adolescent pregnancy in both the Caribbean and South America, with 97 out of every 1,000 girls between the ages of 15 and 19 giving birth. This country was surpassed only by Ecuador 100/1,000 in South America and by the Dominican Republic 98/1000 in the Caribbean. Isn’t it time we used these dreadful statistics for more than looking bad in reports? Isn’t it time to take intervention programmes far and wide and really give our children a chance?
