OCTOBER 15 — This morning I woke up to the news that an 18-year-old girl died while giving birth in a house in Perak and the police had sent her body for a post mortem. Her baby also did not make it.
I don't even know her religion or her race and I don't really want to know. All I know is that a young girl with so much promise, so much potential died simply because she had sex and got pregnant. That's the fatal mistake she made and she paid with her life.
We don't need to wait for the results of the post mortem for her cause of death; it's lack of sexual education, lack of access to contraceptives, lack of societal acceptance of teenage pregnancies and the wrenching stigma that surrounds cases like her.
We don't even need to ask why because we already know why.
We don't even need to ask what to do because we know what to do.
Call me an idealist, call me a deluded crusader, call me whatever you want to call me, I don't really care.
But what I care about is no other girl will lose her life or a baby dumped and buried alive or eaten by rodents because society and the authorities continue to preach from their moral high chairs.
So spare me the rhetoric, the preaching, the half past six approach and superficial attempts at solving this problem and look at that girl and her baby and do the right thing.
It's time we do some soul searching as a nation.
Are our face saving and morality so important that it's worth more than the girl's life?
* Dr John Teo is a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist in Kota Kinabalu.
** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.
