By Cristelle Hart Singh | Managing Director
We’ll call her ‘Anita’. Anita is 16 years old and is in love with, we’ll call him ‘Anish’. At 23 years old Anish is an adult and is legally allowed to consent for a sexual relationship, which is not the case for Anita (in India she should be 18). Unknown to the parents, this young couple have been in a physical relationship for a little while now.
Some months ago, Anita’s parents felt that she was putting on weight. With no explanation for this, they decided to take her to the doctor’s. Obviously, without doing a proper examination of the girl, the doctor prescribed medicine for thyroid trouble. They went back home. A few months later, at home, Anita suddenly went into labour and her parents helped deliver her baby. This was the first time they realised that she was in fact pregnant.
This has become a story that we are getting used to hearing. Anita is the 6th girl who comes to us, at Tejus Home, past the legal date for a medical termination of pregnancy, having been to see a doctor for various reasons: missed periods, abdominal pain and back pain. Not once did the doctors think to do a pregnancy test but prescribed medicine to either: make them bleed, for gas trouble and or even back massages to a 6 month pregnant teenager!
We are not sure if this is due to social issues (How can she be pregnant? She’s not married!) or to ignorance but it seems to be an important discussion to have with medical professionals in India.
We have taken the step today itself to approach hospitals to provide training to doctors and nurses as well as other hospital staff on the issue of child sexual abuse and teen pregnancies. Let’s hope we can make some changes.
As for Anita…she spent 2 weeks with her baby girl at Tejus Home while the child welfare authorities decided what to do with her and she was finally allowed to go back home. Her parents will help her take care of the baby, she wants to go back to school and when she reaches 18, she would like to marry Anish.
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