Pierre and PM Rumble Over Teenage Pregnancy

Recently, while enclosed on a plane for sixteen hours, I watched The Hate You Give, a movie adapted from a best-selling novel of the same title that translates Tupac Shakur’s famous tattoo: THUG LIFE. The late rapper had once explained it to be an acronym for a philosophy he espoused: The Hate You Give Little Infants F### Everybody.

The film is one of the latest of continuous media highlighting of the merciless social cycle in which some African Americans are placed: broken homes with children that leave high-school to work and contribute to the household, but are only ever able to find low-income jobs, so they then turn to the same drugs that created their broken homes. These communities, stereotyped into gangs and single mothers, deal with violence, crime, never-ending poverty and death.

Allen Chastanet had no movie or internationally beloved rapper to help deliver his claim when he stated on May 6 at a press meeting that the cycle of young people having children is a main contributor to the escalating crime and violence in the country. It’s a theory that the prime minister has been explaining for years, and in January 2018 on Timothy Poleon’s NewsMaker Live. Last Tuesday, the prime minister found himself defending the theory again on Andre Paul’s What Makes Me Mad after negative public reaction to his May 6 statements. On the occasion he emphasized that under-age pregnancy is also rape.

A week later, the leader of the House opposition, Philip J. Pierre, also appeared on What Makes Me Mad. He wanted to talk “about this thing with single mothers and pregnancy”. It seemed he planned to shock. “Are you ready for that?” he asked, flipping through what must have been the Vital Statistics Report 2014. “First of all, evidence. When you make statements, they must be based on evidence.”

Pierre went on to quote “facts” from the report: “The incidence of teenage pregnancies has been the focus of attention in the society throughout the past decade. The adolescent teenage fertility rate has experienced decreases over time moving from 62.3% in 2002 to 45.4% in 2010 and to 41.1% in 2014.”

After authenticating that the adolescent fertility rate had decreased, albeit to a lesser but still high percentage, and corroborating the prime minister’s previous statements that anyone who impregnates a 12-year-old girl is a criminal, Pierre continued to make his point, though he remained unclear on what he was proving.

“We’re discussing the so-called teenage mothers,” he said, “who make children without having the necessary social structures for them. Because of that fact, we have to be careful with our fertility rate.” (Careful that the fertility rate is decreasing? Careful when handling the fertility rate? Careful when talking about teenage mothers without consulting the fertility rate statistics?)

He went on: “We should encourage these mothers to get some training; we should encourage them to bring their children up in the proper way—and I heard Father Anthony say that at a funeral this week. We should encourage the way these children are brought up. So, we should nurture these children; that would make them proper citizens.”

Pierre also cited, without examples, the consequences of hotel and cruise ship jobs on local families and how shift systems in schools once “impacted the level of crime and the level of criminality and the level of misbehaviour.” He continued: “So it’s not very simple. You see, if you come from a family where you have your mother and your father, that I was fortunate to have . . . you can say these things. But who feels it most, knows it.”

By “these things” Pierre may have referred to some of the prime minister’s May 6 statements but, while Pierre noted a decreasing fertility rate, he did not address the increase of crime and violence in the country. Chastanet insisted last Tuesday that he did not have in mind single mothers, as such; rather, that he was concerned about children having children in an economy that doesn’t accommodate them—a recipe for all kinds of social ills. Pierre’s contribution on Tuesday remained ambiguous about whether he was using his evidence to tell the prime minister that teenage pregnancy did not contribute to the crime problem or that the prime minister was not Looshan enough to properly address under-age pregnancy.

Pierre continued: “So the prime minister doesn’t feel what Saint Lucians feel. He can’t understand it.” In any case, the prime minister’s observations are not new. In February 2018 the STAR published the following: “Teenage pregnancy is a social problem that merits urgent attention, not simply because of the negative impact on the future prospect of the parents but moreso because of the negative effects on the overall well-being of the children throughout life. 

“Back in 1999, at a session of the United Nations General Assembly, Saint Lucia’s representative made the point that a high prevalence of teenage pregnancy has long been a feature of Saint Lucian Society. In 1996 a comparative review of adolescent fertility among islands of the region revealed that Saint Lucia’s rate was 50% higher than that of our neighboring island Barbados, for example, and more than twice that of the United States whose rate was highest among that of industrialized countries for that period.

“The representative added: ‘While at the primary and secondary level, girls continue to out-do boys in performance standards. We are faced with the problem of drop-outs, particularly by girls who become pregnant while at school or who do not move on to tertiary education because of an unplanned pregnancy.’

“She highlighted the plight of these young girls in the following statement: ‘For the most part, they remain unskilled and are forced to take up low-paid jobs, or remain unemployed, dependent on a male partner, and are caught up in the vicious cycle of poverty.’”

Using Pierre’s evidence, while the adolescent fertility rate decreased, so did the overall fertility rate by half. Children born circa 1999 (under a Saint Lucia Labour Party government that included Pierre) as a result of teenage pregnancy are now twenty-year-olds, some who might already have three of their own children and are caught up in the cycle of low-paid jobs and poverty. 

Meanwhile, the country’s homicide rate spiked to its highest as recently as 2017. Last week the STAR also reported: “The May 8, 2019 Bordelais Correctional Facility report states: ‘The majority of incarcerated persons (47%) grew up in single parent households whilst 24% grew up with both parents.’”

The PM and Pierre may be wrestling over respect for teenage mothers but, in the meantime, the cycle manifests around us. They can agree on one thing though: we must do a better job of raising our children. Whether it’s addressed by taking away children from unable mothers or providing family education, our society must undergo an attitudinal change. In the end, that’s also what it came to in The Hate You Give.