Jude Ssempebwa
Recent media reports indicate that the Ministry of Education is reviewing the policy on (primary and secondary school) students that get pregnant during the course of their studies (The New Vision, Monday November 10, 2008). According to the Minister, Honorable Namirembe Bitamazire, the goal of the review is to introduce more stringent measures that will deny these students examinations, because they inconvenience the schools and allowing them to sit for their (final) examinations is unhealthy and sets a bad precedent for the younger girls. For a number of reasons, such cursory views have been commonly expressed, albeit by uncritical, and usually moralistic, commentators. Now that they are informing policy review, however, it is well deserved that the reviewers of the policy are brought to understand that these students need support not condemnation.
Contrary to the Minister’s argument, students that get pregnant during the course of their studies are not necessarily immoral; many of them are victims of rape and defilement, sometimes by teachers and parents that they (understandably) cannot disclose. Secondly, pregnant students do not necessarily give their peers a bad example, since many of the peers are already involved in fornication only that they have not yet been found pregnant. Besides, we now have highly varied categories of students, including adults that are in marriage or cohabitation and who have both the unalienable right to produce children and to education under articles 31 and 30 of the constitution respectively. Even though the Minister argues that school is meant for studying and not producing children, attainment of Education for All necessitates the accommodation of students from all walks of life, including those that ostensibly inconvenience the school system.
Those in favor of expelling pregnant students from the school system focus on worsening the plight of the students, to deter other students from getting pregnant. Consequently the educational, and often professional, future of the students is deliberately blurred. Fearing such condemnation, many girls that find themselves pregnant resort to (unsafe) abortion. Rather than focus on blurring the future of pregnant students, therefore, the Ministry, and other policy makers, should focus on why students get pregnant during the course of their studies as a basis for the generation of solutions.
Adult students get pregnant during the course of their studies because it is fine for them to do so while juveniles do so as a consequence of abuse or consensual fornication involvement. Rather than treat all the categories of students as deserving to be rejected, therefore, the Ministry should consider interventions that are suited to support each category depending on the peculiarity of their needs. For adult students, pregnancy during the course of studying should be unconditionally accepted and, if need be, facilities or special schools to allow for their seclusion from other students in cases where they could inconvenience them developed. Such facilities could also accommodate juveniles that get pregnant during the course of their studies. In any case, however, there will not be need for training teachers in midwifery as is feared by the Minister since schools already have doctors and/or nurses. On the other hand, the prevention of sexual abuse, through empowering girls with life skills and apprehending the abusers would resolve the problem of student pregnancies better than the elimination of the victims of such abuse from the school system. Finally, overriding attention should be placed, not on threatening girls with expulsion from schools, but addressing the factors that have motivated and supported consensual fornication involvement including the general lack of quality sex education in many schools and homes.
