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Tamale, Ghana – The Northern Sector Manager of Marie Stopes Ghana, Patricia Antwi-Boasiako, has said that the lack of sexuality education at homes and schools could partly be blamed for the increasing rates of teenage pregnancy and unsafe abortion practices in the country.
She noted that, evidence in the literature showed that inadequate sexuality education was a major precursor to risky sexual behaviour among adolescents. “Because young people are not adequately informed, their sexual behavioural choices are often predicated on assumptions, misinformation and scanty information they may have chanced upon somewhere”.
For the adolescent, she explained that “the home and the school system are where they spend most of their productive hours in the day, that is from 8-10 hours in school, 4-6 hours at home and 8 hours in bed. This implies therefore that the greatest opportunities to educate them on sexual and reproductive health issues are in these two locations”, Madam Patricia told Savannahnewsonline.com in an interview recently in Tamale.
According to her, “any missed hour with them (adolescents) in these two locations (referring to the home and school) therefore make them most vulnerable to making wrong choices, on the basis of the little information they may have come across on their own”.
Madam Patricia maintained: “Failure therefore, on the part of the home and the school to provide some level of sexuality education to the adolescent can be said to be partly responsible for the observed rise in teenage pregnancies and unsafe abortions”.
The worries of many women getting pregnant as a result of unprotected sex were addressed through the introduction of a wide range of birth control measures such as emergency contraceptives.
But there is currently a worrying development across the country among young women and most especially young girls in basic and senior high schools, who are abusing the use of emergency contraceptives.
Savannahnewsonline.com has gathered that, most of these young girls take these pills regularly, whether they have engaged in unprotected sex or not.
Emergency contraception or post-coital contraception refers to methods of contraception that can be used to prevent pregnancy in the first few days after unprotected sexual intercourse, rape or contraceptive failure such as torn condoms.
But according to Madam Patricia, although science is yet to establish the full potential risks of abusing emergency pills, “it is undeniable, however, that the abuse of any drug at all puts a lot of pressure on the liver and the kidneys, and can cause kidney failures and liver related problems. These two are established risks of drug abuse”, she stated.
Marie Stopes Ghana is an international organization that provides family planning and sexual reproductive health services. Currently, the organization is working in 37 countries across the world and has been in existence for 40 years.
It started operations in Ghana since 2006 and currently works in the ten regions of Ghana where it is looking at improving the lives of women, men and young girls by ensuring that they can access family planning and reproductive health services and information they need.
By Savannahnewsonline.com
