Speaking at a forum on child marriages today, Amilia said that teenage pregnancies were extremely risky, as the body was not fully developed to handle such a task.

“Pregnancy complications are 2.5 times higher among teenage mothers,” she said.

Teenage pregnancies were also risky for the babies. “The risk of babies dying after being born by teenage mothers is much higher compared to babies born by mothers aged between 20 to 24,” she said.

She said that among the reasons babies died after being born were due to accidental drowning, child abuse and child neglect.

She said that prenatal deaths were also two times higher among mothers under 20.

Former Women’s Aid Organisation social worker and independent lecturer Nazlina Abdul Ghani said that society needed to stop seeing marriage as a way to avoid premarital sex. There were many other ways to achieve this goal: “one of it is through sex education,” she said.

She questioned Malaysia’s position on sex education? “Whether you like it or not, children are going to learn about sex and they can either learn it the right way or the wrong way,” she said.

Bar Council shariah law committee member Khutubul Zaman Bukhari said Malaysian marriage law did not provide for the best interests of the child, as stated in the UN Convention on Child Rights, and should be amended to suit it.

The mufti of Terengganu, Ismail Yahya, a former Shariah Court chief judge, called for the minimum age for marriage to be set at 18 years.

He said that in Islam a person must be baligh (have reached puberty) and must be mature enough to be able to decide on marriage. He said the age of maturity changed from time to time. Fiqh (the theory and philosophy of Islamic law) was flexible and also changed over time.