Don’t force people into marriage to have sex
(MMO) – Maybe that 31-year-old woman’s boyfriend didn’t want to marry her yet, if ever. What’s a woman to do then? Lifelong abstinence is only for priests and nuns.
The recent case of a 31-year-old unmarried woman who allegedly chopped the corpse of her stillborn into eight pieces shows yet again the failure of Malaysia’s abstinence-based reproductive health policies that are driven by morality and religious beliefs.
The woman was vilified in the news, including in ultra-conservative news portal ismaweb.net, which conveniently left out the fact that the baby was already dead before it was dismembered, and is now under investigation under Section 318 of the Penal Code for concealing the birth of a child. The offence is punishable with two years’ jail.
That law is utterly sexist as it is women who get pregnant and who have to bear the social (and legal) consequences of having children out of wedlock.
We get enraged at women for dumping their babies, yet we allow a system that encourages unwanted pregnancies by teaching abstinence instead of safe sex in schools, by refusing contraception to unmarried couples at government hospitals and clinics, and by making abortion illegal.
Abstinence advocates blame unwanted pregnancies and baby dumping on horny couples who can’t wait till marriage to get it on. Their solution is more religious or abstinence-based sex education. And if that fails, they shrug and go on to condemn the woman for being such a slut and getting pregnant.
Let’s face it — we can’t (and shouldn’t) stop people from having sex and doing what they want with their bodies. So the next best thing is to prevent the undesirable consequences of (unsafe) sex—sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies and baby dumping.
It’s incredibly selfish to promote ineffective policies like abstinence-based sex education for the sake of your personal religious beliefs or moral convictions, and then wash your hands off when people choose to have sex anyway and risk burdening the State with unwanted pregnancies because of their ignorance.
We expend police resources to hunt down women who abandon their babies or who get abortions, while the ones who aren’t dumped end up in public orphanages. Or the children may be raised by single mothers and get sucked into the cycle of poverty and crime. All this costs the State, not to mention the psychological costs to the mothers and unwanted children.
What does it cost the State when people have safe sex before marriage and don’t end up getting pregnant? Nothing. Perhaps their souls (to the religious folk), but then, that’s between them and God, isn’t it? I don’t think anyone can say with certainty that people who have premarital sex will go to hell.
