Games
see camalkaa reer magaal aan kuu haayste? Somalis f*ck one another like any ethnic group and the sooner they learn about contraception the better because Somalis use abortion as contraception and that is why abortion is so high among the Somali community. The abortion rates among Somalis is 3 times higher than the State average in Minnesota. Read this.
Reproductive health
Two focus groups with young participants and four Somali key informants expressed concern about the silence that surrounded girls’ reproductive decision making. Quietly raising this issue, a young Somali woman stated,
Right now, there’s a cultural clash between the older generation and the younger generation. People are going to be shocked when I say this, but in our community, young girls are sexually active. There is this idea, based on culture and religion, that young girls are not to have sex until they are married, which is safer with all these sexually transmitted diseases. But if you go to any high school, young Somali girls are sexually active, and they don’t know how to protect themselves. This is a taboo subject in our culture. Our mothers will not sit down with us and say, ‘Okay, don’t have sex, but if you are, do this and this.’ [Instead] they will say, ‘Don’t have sex’ and there is nothing beyond that. The reality is, as much as our parents would love the idea that kids are doing the things they are supposed to, a lot of girls are having abortions. I don’t know about cases of HIV. But that means if girls are not getting education from their mothers or the family, then we should have outside sources available. Culture and religion are not allowing us to talk about this. We can’t talk about prevention especially with our own parents. It also has to do with puberty. When a girl reaches puberty, there are a lot of things that she doesn’t know. So moms need to sit with their daughters, like a girl can get her period and not even know what that is. So, yeah, there’s a lot that we need to talk about.
Echoing this concern during a key informant interview, a Somali nurse acknowledged uncertainty about opening discussion on reproductive health with her own puberty-age children and queried, “As girls get bigger, there’s the issue of birth control and in my culture and religion, you can’t have sex before marriage, but what are they doing? Is it right to teach them? I don’t know what’s right.” It’s hard to understand my culture.” Another participant stated, “You raise your daughter and hope a nice man marries her. That’s all you hope. So to sit down and talk about sex, it’s taboo. No one wants to talk about it. You don’t know where to start.”
A Somali nurse acknowledged, “The number of abortion is high. They [young women] are not taking birth control but once it happens, they want to terminate. Our culture, our religion says it’s wrong but at that moment, all she’s thinking is, ‘I don’t want this baby.’”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2893335/
