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Concerns raised over early marriage campaign
“Being married brings peace to your heart
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“Being married brings peace to your heart. So, what are you waiting for?” said @gerakannikahmuda, an online movement that promotes marriage to young people, on Instagram, a message that received nearly 6,000 likes in just two days. The account itself is followed by over 400,000 users.
Similar accounts encouraging young people to get married have also emerged, each gaining hundreds of thousands of followers. Among the popular accounts are @indonesiatanpapacaran (Indonesia without dating) with roughly 955,000 followers and @beraninikah (dare to get married) with over 100,000 followers.
The promoters of the movement call on the young generation to avoid committing sins, mainly extramarital sex, by getting married while they are still young.
The increasing popularity of the movement has raised concerns among promoters of family planning, including authorities, which champion planned marriage and parenthood to create a prosperous family.
“Early marriage is also related to infant and mother mortality. Several studies suggest that the younger the mothers are, the higher the rate of deaths is,” said Alifah Nuranti, a top official at the National Population and Family Planning Board (BKKBN), on Tuesday.
She further added that, for that very reason, women were strongly advised to get married at the age of at least 21, when their uterus is strong enough to bear a fetus. Being pregnant at the age of 19 or younger — called teen or adolescent pregnancy — poses some health challenges.
A World Health Organization (WHO) report reveals that adolescent mothers, aged 10 to 19, face higher risks of eclampsia, a condition that causes seizures during pregnancy, and systemic infections compared to women aged 20 to 24 years.
Early childbearing can also increase risks for newborns as well as young mothers, the report goes on, adding that newborns born to adolescent mothers are also at greater risk of having low birth weight with long-term potential effects.
“The early marriage campaign definitely affects our family planning program. It complicates our work,” Alifah emphasized.
She added that the prevailing marriage regulation, Law No. 1/1974, had also failed to ease the work of the BKKBN in ensuring the welfare of every family as the law stipulates that women aged 16 are allowed to get
married.
In December last year, the Constitutional Court issued a ruling, calling the stipulation unconstitutional. The Court, however, did not make any recommendation on the ideal minimum age to marry, leaving it to the lawmakers to deliberate law revisions.
A 2016 United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) report shows high rates of child marriage in Indonesia as more than one-sixth of girls in the country married annually before reaching maturity.
The figure stood at around 340,000 girls — meaning that Indonesia has the seventh-highest rate of child marriage in the world.
Ahmad Hasan Asyari, a lecturer at Walisongo State Islamic University in Central Java, said the BKKBN together with moderate Muslim figures should actively approach social media users — particularly those who adhere to conservative values — to carefully instill the core value of family planning.
“Islam calls on its followers to create financially and intellectually strong successors. It won’t happen if parents do not have proper family planning,” Ahmad said.
Ahmad was a speaker at the International Training on Strategic Partnership with Muslim Religious Leaders in Family Planning, an event organized by the BKKBN together with the UN Population Fund (UNFPA).
Risman Musa, another speaker at the training event explained that the conservative perspective promoting early marriage was brought to the surface by new Muslim figures who had just completed their Islamic studies in the Middle East.
“We have to embrace these new Muslim figures and have a deep conversation with them to make them understand our priority to bring forth quality successors,” Risman said.
