Nigeria: Child Marriage - We Must Stop Getting Our Young Girls Pregnant

By Sola Ogundipe, 26 July 2013

 

AT 13, Hafsat Auwalu was married. At 14, she became pregnant. When it was time for her to be delivered of her baby, Hafsat was taken to the nearby primary healthcare facility where she laboured for hours, but the baby would not come out.

There was a problem. Hafsat is frail in stature with a small pelvis. Her pelvis was too narrow for the head of the baby to pass through. She pushed and pushed, but the baby's head was lodged in the narrow birth canal. The pain was excruciating.
There was nothing the birth attendants could do. There was no doctor on call and no one in attendance had the skill or the equipment to perform an emergency Caesarean Section. They only urged her to push harder. To worsen her plight the unskilled birth attendants simply cut through the birth canal to create passage for the baby.
Pressure against pelvis
As she pushed, the pressure against her pelvis gradually cut off blood to the surrounding tissue. Eventually, the tissue around her birth canal and bladder died off, creating a fistula, or hole. When the baby finally emerged, it was stillbirth.
The worst had happened. The would-be mother began to stink, urine trickling out of her unabated. Days passed and nothing changed. Hafsat had suffered an obstetric accident known as Vesico-Vaginal Fistula, VVF - one of the worst and most dreaded complications of childbirth. She is one of the millions of girls aged 11-18 in the country who become mothers early or through accidental pregnancy as a result of unprotected sexual intercourse.
Demeaning and degrading, the disorder is typified by continuous and uncontrollable leakage of urine from a woman's bladder. A variant that occurs when there is uncontrolled passage of faeces is referred to as Recto-Vaginal Fistula, RVF.
No thanks to the practice of early marriage, obstetric fistula, a serious medical condition eradicated in North America and Europe over a Century ago, is still around as thousands continue to live with it in countries such as Nigeria where at least 100,000 new cases occur every year.
Treatment at gynaecology clinics
According to the United Nations Population Fund, UNFPA, in sub-Saharan Africa, where one in 10 girls becomes a mother by age 16, scores of girls and women suffering from one or both forms of fistulae are condemned to carry the brand of social outcasts and even though there is treatment at gynaecology clinics nationwide, most healthcare personnel are ill prepared to deal with the malady