Zamboanga

The Zamboanga phenomenon: 10-year-old at childbirth

?AMBOANGA CITY - The delivery of a baby usually bring happiness into the whole household. Précicious (not her actual name) was only 10 years old and a casualty of incestia. Your baby has been transferred to a state institution for adoption by a foreigner. When she was washing, Maria said she had to give her two kids - then 4 and 8 years old - to her father-in-law as she went from door to door to do the washing.

Yet she had no clue that her daugther was already born. The town' s charity worker, Maria Socorro Rojas, said that the cases of the Precious and Maria's daughters were not isolation. A lot of other women give birth very early because of sexually abused women, including inbreeding.

The number of sexual abuse cases in the town alone was 126 in 2017. However, it was not clear how many people had been affected by incestuous acts, as the police involved the cases in rapes. "Unfortunately, few are reported," Rojas said. But Uddin said what was worrying was that the pregnant women were getting younger and younger.

By 2017, 52 women between the age of 10-13, 552 between the age of 14-16 and 2,645 between the age of 17-19 will give birth. In 2016 there were 410 women between 10-14 years of age, while 558 were between 15 and 16 years old. The number of those who gave birth at the age of 17-19 years was 2,118. In addition to incesti, Uddin said that other causes of early pregnancy were experimentation about sexual relations between young women and playfellows, especially in the Talon-Talon, Labuan, Ayala and Mercedes wards.

Mr Rojas said that welfare ministers would immediately take action in cases of incestuous and other types of sexually explicit abuses. "It is heartbreaking to see young women who are frisky and forgetful about their condition," she said. The Population Commission's (Popcom) head of Western Mindanao, Reynaldo Wong, said that there are other drivers behind children's pregnancy.

It said on the basis of Popcom's Adult Fertility Study, most teenage women become pregant because they are involved in pre-marital sexual ity after seeing porno on so-so. As well as incestuousness, Rojas said that arranging weddings also helped to get young women premature. Dr. Juan Antonio Perez III, CEO of Popcom, said in the Zamboanga Peninsula, five women between 10-14 years of age give Birth every single second.

"And one of them comes from Zamboanga City," said Perez. "That'?s about 500 teens giving mother every day," he said. For Popcom officers, he said that a young woman at childbirth was already an immediate disaster.