As I walk down the street I intend to see lots of teenagers being pregnant, and I ask my self: has pregnancy become a fashion nowadays? What has happened to the proud girls of Africa, who would join cultural dance events, where are the girls who used to be proud of being who they are, who respected their cultures and customs, who valued their body as the temple of God, where have they gone to? Way back in the days (in the African culture) it was unacceptable and a disgrace to the family of unmarried teenagers to be pregnant, it also encouraged the ancient people to prevent themselves from getting pregnant. Back then virginity test were done to teenagers to check if they are still pure (virgins) as they were suppose to be and every girl looked forward to it, because they wanted everyone to know that they are proudly virgins. They by all means knew that they will achieve good results for keeping themselves from practicing sex at the early age, meaning to abstain.

Nowadays every corner you turn to you are likely to see a pregnant teen, pushing their stomach depressingly buying formula for the expected, realizing the consequences of having a baby is a difficult job. Other teens get pregnant because there is a grant given by the government for a teenage mother to add in helping to raise a child.  But what they usually do with the money is to buy themselves some clothes to wear to parties on weekends, and so they don’t buy food for the child, and the baby will starve and have a lack of vitamins and nutrition that causes deficiency disease to the child. But they keep on crying to the government that the government doesn’t keep their promises to the poor people of Africa.

They even complain that they don’t have proper play grounds for them to play sports. In some cases others don’t even have this ground so they end up finding their selves an activity that will satisfy their souls. In this case the solution that they find is to expose themselves in sexual practice. Most teenagers are being pressurized by their friends, telling them who to go with and whether to sleep with him or not. That’s all a matter of being accepted in that particular group of people, everyone wants to be part of a certain group of people so that they won’t feel left out as they all want to be loved.

Some girls don’t receive the love that they need, so they end up mixing with some gang of wrong doers. To them it’s a way of perceiving life in different perspectives by mixing with those gangs, in the intention of exploring other ways of living. Other girls get involved in having a sugar daddy, in intentions of feeding her family by sleeping with the sugar daddy, and give her money, if the sugar daddy is satisfied then he give her all she wants. Other girls got pregnant because of selling their bodies to satisfy the villain, that doesn’t care about minority. The girls get involved in prostitution because there is no one home who provides food for them to eat, so they see as the only way to put food on the table. Somehow their parents died of HIV/AIDS. As we all know, HIV/AIDS is a very serious virus that can not be cured.

Opinion by Ntombie

My opinion to the young people out there is that they should take care of their bodies and see it as a respectable thing. People should be very responsible about the decisions they take because every thing you do has its own consequences that might affect you badly in future, like killing yourself because you are HIV positive or your partner run like a coward after hearing that you are pregnant. So you end up having no one that will help you raise the child you are carrying. And also we should get help or advices from older people about having sex at the early age, but we all know that there are pills that you can take, use a condom when decided to have sex or, what would be the most protective thing to do to avoid all this stuff is to abstain.

Opinion by Spha

Also what you could do is to go and seek for help to places like love Life. Try to find help at school at teachers that understand student’s problems. Not forgetting to stay away from friends that denounce you and your opinions of living good life, and also you can get free help advices in nearest clinics. If you are sexually active you can get the pills.