Jan 15 2009
Safe Sex Ed For Maids
Recently, a Canadian woman, Juanita Stead, mistook her stomach pains for kidney stones and was rushed to hospital only to give birth to a full-term baby. Ms Stead claimed that she did not suffer morning sickness and continued to menstruate and so she had no idea she was pregnant.
I encountered a similar claim when I interviewed a maid who gave birth in Singapore. The routine pregnancy test she took in October turned out negative, but on 11 Dec, Nina gave birth to a baby boy she had been carrying for 27 weeks. (“The Test That Failed” Today Dec 23 )
When I asked her how she got pregnant, Nina was too dumbstruck to answer, she kept saying “I don’t know, I don’t know how.” I switched tack and asked her about her Malaysian boyfriend. Nina told me she met Jai sometime in January last year and within weeks he proposed to her, promising her that they would get married in Dec 2008.
When I asked her whether they had used contraception during sex, Nina said no. I asked her why and she replied: “My boyfriend said that even if I got pregnant, I would still marry him, since we already agree to marry in December.”
Nina tells me that she doesn’t know the full and real name of the father of her baby and that she can’t contact him because he has changed his mobile number.
The social worker and I were floored. Was this 26-year-old so naïve? How could she be so taken in by sweet words? Not only that, did she know that she was putting herself at risk at catching sexually transmitted infections (STI), including HIV and Aids?
It has lead me to think that despite the good work that migrant welfare groups like HOME and TWC2 have done for foreign domestic workers and foreign workers, perhaps these organisations should come up with a safe sex campaign for maids not just for preventing pregnancies, but also HIV/Aids and STIs, and make it part of their regular outreach work.
