Kho Teck Wan
KUCHING: Topics concerning sexual health education, responsibilities of raising a child, and consequences of teenage pregnancy should in taught to students as early as the age of 13, a Sarawak United People’s Party (SUPP) leader has suggested.
SUPP Women chief Kho Teck Wan said these topics should be taught under the subjects of religion, sciences and moral, as a way to raise awareness and reduce incidences of teenage pregnancy in Sarawak.
“The call for formal sexual health education and awareness in school was a topic of discussion for many years.
“I call for the support of parents, teachers and religious leaders to speak receptively about teenage pregnancy to our young teenagers. Hopefully with more awareness and involvement from all corners of our society, we can further reduce teenage pregnancy in Sarawak,” she said in a statement yesterday.
Her statement was in response to a press release by Welfare, Community Well Being, Women, Family and Childhood Development Minister Dato Sri Fatimah Abdullah, who heads the One-Stop Teenage Pregnancy Committee (OSTPC), which revealed that teenage pregnancy in the state had gone down from 2,909 cases or 7.7 per cent in 2015, to 1,967 cases or 5.49 per cent in 2019.
Kho said that Sarawak has one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in Malaysia, adding the fact that the age of teenage pregnancy was getting younger is a cause of great concern.
“As a society, we need to face the brutal truth that a girl raising a child faces great challenges in life, and the impacts may last a lifetime.”
The OSTPC, comprising representatives from government and non-government agencies, runs a very comprehensive programme to take care of the health, wellbeing and continuous education of both the pregnant teenager and her newborn.
Fatimah’s recent press release showed that the percentage of unwed pregnant teenagers rose from 48.47 per cent in 2015 to 63.3 per cent in 2019.
It also showed that in 2015, 94.5 per cent of all teenage pregnancies in Sarawak involved those who were either not schooling at the time, or had dropped out of school upon becoming pregnant.
This figure rose to 96.7 per cent in 2019.