Teen births rise over Christmas and New Year in South Africa. Girls face blame while adults escape accountability.
Nothing is sacred in South Africa. It is a place and time where our morals are negotiable and there is no necessity for them to be upheld.
What is set as a standard and norm of public decency in our age and time seems to have its lines blurred and not set in stone.
We are now in a space where corruption does not move us and sex scandals where ministers share girlfriends and their bedroom secrets are Sunday tabloid fodder.
Schools are now labour wards as teenage pregnancy rises and continues to rise.
We are in an age where presidents and their families are sold to the highest bidder, femicide and pedicide are at soaring rates and child rapists confess to using drugs with their mothers – imagine: a mother introducing her child to drugs and not warning him or her of the dangers of drug abuse.
Where is our moral compass as a nation? If this is where we are, where are we headed?
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We cannot as a nation continue this way. We must rein ourselves in as a country – but before we start with the country, we must start with our families: the men and women in the mirror. As the home rots, the rot escapes the house and seeps into the community and other people and families must survive this.
Our moral compass is off; this is something we must remedy.
Every year, like clockwork, the country pauses to count the number of teenage births recorded on Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, folding these figures neatly into our annual statistics.
The numbers trend, headlines are written and for a brief moment concern is expressed. Yet, soon after, the conversation is quietly shelved.
We rarely interrogate the more uncomfortable questions that should follow: who are these children having babies with and under what circumstances?
Why does the focus remain on the teenage mothers, while the adults involved often escape scrutiny entirely?
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The absence of sustained inquiry reflects a troubling tolerance for a system that normalises exploitation through silence.
Without probing accountability or enforcing meaningful punitive measures, these statistics become little more than ritualised shock value.
If we are serious about protecting children, then counting births cannot be the end of the discussion.
It must be the beginning of honest, sustained action that confronts responsibility, safeguards minors and challenges the structures that allow this cycle to repeat itself year after year.
Teenagers giving birth on Christmas Day have increased from 90 in 2024, to 130 in 2025, and this is a warning that cannot be ignored.
As we move into a new year, far greater effort is required in educating the girl child, equipping her with knowledge, confidence and a full understanding of what is at stake.
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Awareness alone, however, is not enough.
There must be even stronger investment in the successful prosecution of the men who impregnate these children.
Public discourse has centred almost exclusively on the girls, while remaining largely silent on the adults who place them in this position.
This imbalance enables impunity and perpetuates harm.
Perhaps the new year demands a shift in narrative: one that stops treating teenage pregnancy as an unfortunate statistic and starts asking the harder question of responsibility.
Who, exactly, is turning children into mothers – and why are they not being held accountable?
