Maddi Runkles, a student from Heritage Academy in Hagerstown, Maryland in the US has been condemned by her school and denied the chance to attend her graduation ceremony because she is pregnant.
The 18-year-old has been accused of violating the university code of conduct. The code she signed barred students from engaging in certain conducts such as pre-marital sex and drugs. She has an option to abort and kill her unborn child, which choice she has rejected, and will therefore miss her graduation on the 2nd of May.
The teenager was forced to publicly speak about her condition in front of her classmates at an assembly gathering, and there she asked for forgiveness and mercy from her school, but was denied. Her father too, that stood on the Heritage board of directors as the president resigned his position out of anger from the way her daughter was treated.
A number of faith based institutions in Uganda like Uganda Christian University (UCU) and Islamic University in Uganda have quite similar conservative religious tendencies. The code of conduct of UCU under the pregnancy regulations provides that unmarried women who while students at the university, get pregnant shall be guilty of an offence.
Maddi abstained from naming the person responsible for her pregnancy. She now carries the weight of the shame and humiliation of her school’s actions on her shoulders. To some, it does not look like justice to have one party alone penalised, worse still denied someone the chance to celebrate such a life time event as a graduation.
To her such a punishment is so severe since the code does not lay out the punishments for breaking the rules. Another penalty would have sufficed. Students in the US are running campaigns so that the school may reconsider the decision it made.
Additional reporting from theblaze.com
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