Outrage as 12 year old girl impregnated by 17 year old boy gives birth on new year day in South Africa

The Executive Director of the Family Policy Institute, Errol Naidoo, says broken family structures are the biggest contributors to the high number of teenage pregnancies in the country.

A significant number of teenagers under the age of 16 gave birth on Christmas and New Year’s Day, the youngest being a 12-year-old girl from the Eastern Cape.

This has raised alarm and some men have been charged with statutory rape. Naidoo says this should be a wake-up call.

“And you look at research all over the world, it shows you that children that grow up in fatherless homes without a father figure present, teen pregnancies, drug addiction, alcohol addiction, school dropouts are all prevalent in those homes. And so we’re struggling with a number of issues, if you ask what is the key issue, the key issue is family breakdown and fatherless homes that’s affecting that,” Naidoo elaborates.

South Africa has one of the highest ‘teen pregnancy’ rates in the world.

According to Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) over 90 000 girls aged 10 to 19 years gave birth from March 2021 to April 2022 in all nine
provinces.