Children Raising Children, The Cycle of Reproductive Rights in Argentina

In 2002, an Argentinean woman named Romina Tejerina was raped by her neighbor. In 2003, Tejerina gave birth to a baby conceived after the rape in her bathroom where shortly afterwards, Tejerina killed the baby. In 2005, she was sentenced to fourteen years in prison for homicide.

This was the story I carried to Argentina in the fall of 2008.

Click on image for image credit.

At 20, I was spending a semester abroad in Buenos Aires. Three weeks into the program, the group traveled 20 hours to Salta, located in northern Argentina. During this trip, we visited Entre Mujeres, an organization devoted to advocating and raising awareness for women’s reproductive rights. While we sat on a futon in the small office, one of the lead organizers recounted the story of Tejerina, which had taken place in the neighboring city of Jujuy. While sharing the story, our host suddenly began to cry. Tejerina’s story haunted women throughout the nation. It reminded them how desperate the situation was and how much worse it could become.

In a matter of months, I had heard this story twice, both times from Argentinean women who were trying to impart the gravity of circumstances for women in the nation. I left the Entre Mujeres office that day feeling inspired by the organization and engrossed in this sector of Argentina’s social politics.

A final requirement of the program gave me the opportunity to conduct an independent study project which would allow me to explore one aspect of women’s rights, or perhaps lack there of. Considering the prevalence of feminist organizations devoted to women’s sexual health in Argentina, I set out to investigate how practices of gender roles affected the rates of teenage pregnancy.

Informing my curiosity about this topic was my awareness of how much it would reveal about the supposed resources designed for young women and how much the government and cultural environment invests in this developing population. With help from my academic coordinator, I was put in touch with the head gynecologist of a public health center located in a low-income suburb outside of Buenos Aires named Derqui. In Derqui, the rate of teenage pregnancy was a staggering 30% in 2008.

Centro de Salud, Derqui. Click on image for image credit.

After all, it was only in 2002 that the Argentinean government passed law 25.673, which mandated sexual health and responsible procreation through the provision of contraceptives and materials related to sexual education. Along with a host of laws such as 26.150, which established the necessity for sexual education for youth and school-aged children, it became clearer that these laws were issued specifically to address and thereby bolster women’s health. However the result of these laws is rarely palpable. As the Human Rights Watch publication “Illusions of Care” notes

Many people become pregnant due to negligent care that deprives them of the right to make independent decisions about their health and lives, such as when the government does not purchase or distribute contraceptive supplies that it has promised to provide, and legal sterilization procedures are arbitrarily denied.

Women in Argentina continue to face a lack of proper sexual education and access to contraceptives, not to mention the fact that abortion is still illegal. Traditional gender roles remain hyper pervasive, and the Catholic Church is a huge force to reckon with.

Coming from the United States as a privileged feminist, I approached my project with the assumption that these young women were being oppressed. I shamefully admit that I missed taking personal agency into account when I hypothesized that these young women would identify as subjugated. I thought they would recognize their lack of rights compared to male youth, and openly discuss the interweaving socio-cultural injustices of being a sixteen year old mother.

Instead, I learned that motherhood had not affected them in the way that I had imagined. The five young women I spoke with appeared indifferent to my questions about their lives and motivations. Their answers were practically identical when asked how their lives had changed. “Nothing has changed in my life” they would tell me “I helped raised my younger siblings, having my own child has not been different.”

The premise of becoming pregnant was not terribly threatening.  As such, the young women I spoke with seemed virtually non-plussed with the idea of birth control. When I asked a few adolescents about their methods of protection, the majority of women claimed using condoms or birth control pills, but I consistently heard similarly disinterested responses nonetheless. “I didn’t like it”, “I didn’t know anything about it”, “I was using it, but I forgot”.

Free Pregnancy Test. Click on image for image credit.

I didn’t attribute these responses to naïveté on the part of these young women, though it astounded me the amount of disregard I could hear in their voices

After speaking with my advisor, who provided insight into the communities in which these young women were raised, I began to comprehend that these young women had minimal personal or social obligations aside from motherhood. In Derqui at least, the expectation that all young women would grow up and become mothers was entrenched in the culture. In the words of one young woman “I think there are so many pregnant teenagers because parents congratulate their daughters when they begin having sexual relationships.” As an effect of this mode of thought, the age at which they became pregnant was less meaningful than the fact that they were pregnant at all. That most of them, at fifteen, sixteen and seventeen were no longer in school, that none of them had received a proper sexual education was hardly coincidental.

But a part of me remained confounded. The ability to control your intimacy and reproductive health is exactly what so many women in Argentina are fighting for; the right to have total access to their bodies with full legal support—no lapses in federal responsibilities and no two-faced prosecution from the government. The older women whom I spoke with at the center (and by older, I mean 21-24 years old) seemed to believe that their younger counterparts were severely misinformed about sexual practices and were fairly critical for that reason. “They want to appear older, so they act like us. For them, it’s a game.”

This older group of women was able to provide me with some information on their experiences from a more mature standpoint and listening to them provided me with a sense of what these pregnant youth would come to face. That is, men are rarely, if ever, expected to take on the responsibilities of good parenting. While one of the women described that her partner helped her quite a bit “He helps me a ton, he does the laundry, he cooks, and he works. He tells me the most important thing is for me to relax and care for our daughter”, other women described men as negligent, “They realize it’s easier, it’s easier to leave a woman when they [men] don’t have any responsibility.”

Equally as troubling was the fact that half of the young women I spoke to were involved in relationships with men who were much older than them. In the US, these relationships would far surpass statutory rape. I spoke with a sixteen year old whose 13 year old sister was in a sexual relationship with an 18 year old. Many of these young women describe older men as more responsible, more willing to take care of them when they find themselves, well, pregnant. While this is seemingly valid rationale, it simultaneously presents us with the classic sense of vulnerable young women with less-than exceptional understandings of their rights, being taken advantage of. What does a twenty-two year old male want from a fifteen year old girl? The answer disturbs me.

We all know it takes two to tango, but in Derqui, women are frequently given the responsibility to raise their children single-handedly. Given the lack of proper resources including the right to abortion, the government deems young women capable of raising children, but not enough to make decisions about their bodies and their sexual practices.

Access to abortion is fundamental and symbolic of women’s rights, but it doesn’t begin there. It begins with informed parenting and it grows into comprehensive sexual education, it continues into support for dreams and aspirations, and ultimately it blossoms into the protection of women against abuse and violations such as that of Romina Tejerina’s. Though the solution isn’t totally in the legislation, if Argentina continues to absolve the government of it’s responsibilities to women, what it perpetuates is a cycle of young women having poorly informed sexual relations when they are unprepared, becoming pregnant and then raising children on their own when they have only just left the “age of innocence”. As the friend of one pregnant adolescent powerfully relayed “She doesn’t know how to raise a child, she is just a child herself.”

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