The Ministry of Education's renewed efforts to protect the rights of pregnant high school students is a welcome development. This is not just because the students can look to the future with increasing confidence, but also because it points to a more progressive outlook within a ministry that for so long was a vehicle for bitterly conservative and unmodernizable "Confucian" views.
This is not to say that the writings attributed to Confucius (
This is no less the case with sex education, which has only recently begun to attract the careful attention it so desperately requires. Taiwan's rate of teen pregnancy is as high and as startling as it has been for decades, and this state of affairs will not change as long as the state passes off responsibility for this problem to parents, who in too many cases are not capable of or willing to provide the knowledge that every teenager is entitled to.
Ministry official Chen Yi-hsing (
It is also clear that there is no shortage of people opposed to protecting pregnant students and providing them with the chance to graduate and raise their children without damaging either responsibility.
One of these people is the director of the Taipei County Parents' Association, Lu Hung-chieh (
Lu's comments indicate that an inadequate intellect and a powerful streak of misanthropy -- toward mother and baby -- do not prevent one from becoming the head of a parents' association, at least in Taipei County.
Thankfully there are increasingly competent forces prepared to line up against the likes of Lu and his colleagues, including women's rights groups. But it is clear that in places less dynamic than the metropolis, female students -- and the boys or men that impregnate them -- are a lot less likely to be protected from such hostility and receive supportive counseling and practical assistance in preparing for the responsibilities and challenges of parenthood. The ministry would do well to pay special attention to remote and disadvantaged schools where girls are more likely to find themselves in terrible trouble if the local principal and parents' association wish to punish teenagers for their sexuality.
For many, if not most, women there is no greater life-transforming event than childbirth. But there is no natural or ethical law that states they must have graduated or married before doing so. That Taiwanese law is moving toward the empowerment of the individual at the expense of neo-Confucian residue such as Lu Hung-chieh in this way is cause for much optimism.
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