The provision of sexual and reproductive health services is key to controlling sexually-transmitted diseases, including HIV infection. For this reason, all young people need to have access to such services. The current study has revealed that the provision of contraceptives is the only reproductive health service that parents impose on their disabled daughters. Although parents do
not expect their disabled daughters to marry and have children of their own, they nevertheless are aware of the risk of these disabled young women being raped, which would result in unwanted pregnancy. For this reason, teachers, parents and clinic staff collaborate to impose contraceptives on disabled young women without giving them any information on possible options:
Thandiwe: At Mpumelelo school usually what they do is ask your age…they will take you to a place for needles (injecting
contraceptives) … I did not know that I was starting periods…they
took me to that room where they do needles…first they called my mother and told her that your daughter has done this and this…it is time now that she get family planning…that is how I got into family planning. Asked whether her opinion had been sought over this matter she replied: The school told my mother and I just do what they tell me …
Mcumisa: She (mother) took me to the hospital to get birth pills (contraceptives)…but I have never had a boyfriend and I do not have one now. My mother is just being careful because I move around alone, so I can be raped.
Thandiwe: I am trying to be on the safe side because I might be raped. I stay alone in the house sometimes when every one has gone out…but they tell me not to open the door for a stranger…it has not happened to me…I hear others get raped like that.
As pointed out above, parents are more concerned about preventing pregnancy than rape or HIV/AIDS. Ideal prevention strategies should not only be concerned with preventing negative outcomes, they should promote positive outcomes as well. In this case, preventing pregnancy and HIV infection should be accompanied by promoting more positive sexual experiences as well, but such is the missing element.
Owing to the cultural silence considered earlier, when disabled young women get raped or contract a sexually-transmitted disease, they are not likely to notice any change or to report the matter to parents for fear of reprisal. Consistent with this finding, Nosek et al (2001a) state that some disabled women are not able to detect when they have contracted a sexually- transmitted disease because of either the lack of knowledge to identify
symptoms or the loss of sensation due to paralysis. This fact raises the question of how disabled young women may be assisted to be ‘in touch’ with their bodies when they do not feel them anymore. Certainly, giving information about the dangers of HIV or unwanted pregnancy alone is not sufficient. Planned parenthood is one of the objectives of good reproductive health care, but parents in the current study do not want their disabled children to have children of their own:
FGD 2: They don’t want us to have children to look after us when we are old, yet they have children of their own … most of us take tablets (contraceptives) because we are not allowed to have children. These people (parents) think they love us, but they are only interested in our disability grant. When they die, we will only have our disability grant (instead of children to look after us in our old age).
FGD 4: I say to my child … if you go out to have a baby it’s your own business … I have taken care of you so I cannot take care of another child … if you have a baby, you must know that you will take care of your child yourself.
Disabled young people however, take a dim view of their parents’ and society’s interference with their right to have children of their own. Again, the issue of a disability grant is raised as the only reason most parents appear to care for their disabled children because they benefit from the grant. Otherwise, the idea that disabled young people are sexual beings and desire to have children of their own seems unthinkable for most parents. It follows, that any consideration for disabled young people’s need for sexual and reproductive health care needs or possibility of falling pregnant is equally unthinkable for such parents:
Key 3: When a disabled girl becomes pregnant, it is then that parents become shocked because people with disabilities are treated as if they have got illnesses, they are sick, they are not normal people. Parents will be furious with the male who impregnated the young woman because they treat their child as abnormal, so why are they (man responsible) doing that to their child, they are cruel.
It is a paradox that most parents worry that in the event of the death of parents, their disabled children would have nobody to look after them. Yet the same parents deny these disabled young people the opportunity to have children of their own who would look after them in their old age. Besides, it was stated in Chapter 2 that having children in African societies is regarded as security for the future of parents as their children are expected to look after them. To this end, Ingstad (1995) describes the notion that it is through having children that an African woman is fulfilled and respected by her family and society, and paradoxically, she often becomes more independent than her male counterparts because she has someone to rely upon. Yet disabled young people in Nyanga are denied these perceived benefits of child-bearing.