Deconstructing logic behind law against abandonment of pregnant women
KAYODE KETEFE On August 8, 2011, the Governor of Lagos State, Mr. Babatunde Fashola SAN, signed the Lagos State Criminal Bill into law. The new law, tagged Lagos State Criminal Law, 2011, is a good piece of legislation as it introduced many innovations that transport the criminal law in the state from the Stone Age (which the former Criminal Code Law represents!) to the modern time. This writer does not intend to deal with entire provisions of the law in this particular piece but to scrutinise the logic or illogic behind one of the innovations, contained in section 276 which seeks to check the practice of abandonment of pregnant women. This rather strange section makes provisions for the prosecution and jailing of any man who impregnates and deserts any woman. The obvious intention of the lawmakers is to provide security to helpless victims of rapacious fun seekers; it is meant to curb the "use and dump" practices where unscrupulous men take advantage of husband-seeking women, among others. The disenchantment with the entrenched culture of male exploitation of women folks in virtually all facets of socio-economic life is no doubt re-echoed in this legislative socio-engineering, as it is evident that the intention of S.276 is, among other things, genuine, (even if misconceived), desire for restoration of social equilibrium in male/female relations. But care should always be taken not to fall into error of misdiagnosis of the problem and its concomitant administration of the wrong panacea. The Lagos State has blazed the trail of judicial reforms in Nigeria, especially since 2004 by making many laws which phenomenally reformed the administration of justice; the front-loading initiative under the High Court Civil Procedure Rules of the 2004, the diverse innovations under Administration of Justice Law of 2007, (just re-amended) to mention a few, constituted shining examples for other states to follow. However, this writer opines that the insertion of S.276 in the new law in essence, amounts to unwarranted "moral-mongering"; it is tantamount to government playing to the moral gallery, it is a case of commitment to ethical issues to the exclusion of pragmatism and realism. Law, as a phenomenon, has a coercive effect and ought only to be invoked if the issue at hand has defied solution via other sociological methods. Therefore, it is not every aspect of the perceived social ills that should be subsumed under the criminal jurisprudence. Every society has its mores and code of values, beyond the ambits of the criminal law, which nevertheless guides the people in making choices on moral questions. So, when law keeps making inordinate incursions into the realms that ought to be left to good discretion of the people, more harm, than good, would result. The task of moral conditioning of our youths and adults alike for the tricky challenges of life should be left to the traditional social/religious institutions like the homes, churches, mosques and non-governmental organisations in the areas of moral reformation, otherwise the polity will be endangered by totalitarianism; that is a system where the government controls all aspects of peoples' lives. We should refrain from the temptation to over-legislate our lives; many societies in the developed countries are already reaping the consequences of over-legislation, especially on the issues of marriage and relationships, going by the rate of divorce in their midst. It is a well-documented scientific fact that the bloom of hormonal interaction and changes at adolescence predisposes young people to hyper-sexuality which is purely biological responses, the intensity of which subsides with age. Many well-behaved and otherwise responsible young men, for example, nevertheless succumb to testosterone-fuelled passion of youth which drives them to exuberant sexual behaviour. While this hardly constitutes an excuse for lack of restraint, it will be sheer hypocrisy or perhaps, illiteracy, to deny this fact. Casting these "errant" youths into prison under the guise of protecting another set of people is counter-productive, if not sadism. Is it even in the interest of the unborn child to for his father to be imprisoned? At any rate, we already have legal sanctioning against reckless sexual behaviours in offences like rape, sexual assaults, incest, etc. So we don't need another "ghost" offence in the form of criminalisation of abandonment of pregnant women. Our peoples have evolved numerous ways over the ages of dealing with this kind of problem. For example, the interventions of the older members of the families concerned have been known, in most cases, to produce solutions, like the reunification of the parties in marriage, or compromises, like procurement of undertaking from the man to support the woman and her child. To me, a young man who runs away because he has no job to cater for a family, also deserves pity, he is as much a victim of the dysfunctional socio-economic order, as much as the real victim. Section 276 is therefore an ill will that blows nobody any good. Let government refurbish the schools and overhaul the educational sector in general, reduce incidence of criminality and its attendant insecurity, provide social amenities, and more importantly, reduce poverty in the land, and other things would take care of themselves. . |
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