<p>I don’t have time to do an extensive search now, but the figures I came up with quickly were more like 10-25% teenaged pregnancy rate in the cities I’ve worked in, so I will change the above. It seems like more when the HS dropout rate is 60-70% and there’s not much else for the kids to do. </p>
<p>“I hate the thought of the children being separated from their mothers, but every minute those children stay with their mothers, they are in training to accept abuse.”</p>
<p>The women could be supervised with their children and reprogrammed. There was no reason to separate them. There is nothing like the maternal-child bond and the state usually emphasizes that. This is purely political. Someone wants to get reelected.</p>
<p>I would agree that they could stay together with supervision and away from the influence of the men. At some point, the women have to be willing to choose their children over all else.</p>
<p>that was mentioned earlier- the men could have been removed- and state employees could have been brought in to supervise and aid the women and children .</p>
<p>So if one of the girls is say fourteen and she has a baby are they going to take the child from the child? Awe what a horrible thought. BAck to what really matters, what can we do?</p>
<p>I live in a city and I don’t see it much at all.
My daughter attends an inner city high school & I haven’t seen a single girl in the four years she has attended that was obviously pregnant.
Im not saying it doesn’t happen, but it helps to live in an area where birth control is still available for young men and women.
:)</p>
<p>“why do we care whether someone wants to marry multiple people?”</p>
<p>Personally, I don’t. Consenting adults can choose whatever living arrangements they want as far as I’m concerned.</p>
<p>I agree that taking just the teenage girls from the compound would have been a more sensible option. There was no allegation that boys, or children under 12, were being mistreated.</p>
<p>Hanna: If a community existed in which the children were raised to believe their highest purpose in life was, once they reached sexual maturity, to go out and rape as many people as possible (I understand this is quite different than the FLDS, but my point is about the raising of children to participate in illegal acts), would you not consider that grounds for removal?</p>
<p>Personally, I consider parents who raise children in an ideology that openly admits it disregards the law - especially given the sexually, emotionally, intellectually and apparently often physically abusive nature of that ideology - to be mistreatment enough.</p>
<p>regarding the comparision between incidence of teens giving birth in cities to the compound, I have little problem with denying govt assistance to those who continue to have additional dependents while taking money from the taxpayers.
I would rather that money go towards educating & employing them.</p>
<p>It is damn hard to raise a child, even when you are an adult and married, for a young teen to become a mother- repeatedly - you might as well raise them in a factory.</p>
<p>I predict that this situation will turn out to be a fiasco, especially since it now appears that the call that brought the whole thing on was a hoax. Obviously, this group was a cult that was engaged in illegal activity, namely “marrying off” underage girls. Rather than taking steps to put a stop to that activity, the authorities chose to destroy the entire group, including seizing very small children who are 10 years or more away from the alleged abuse. I consider this to be a very dangerous precedent, because to justify its actions the government will essentially have to label the religious beliefs of this group as false. Imagine this future news story:
“Authorities today raided a residential school at which children were forced to engage in a ritual in which they were told that they were consuming human flesh and drinking human blood. In addition, the students were pressured to renounce normal family life and possessions and to join secretive celibate orders. Finally, students were required to meet privately with male cult leaders (whom they were required to address as “Father”), and to reveal all their supposed sins, including all their sexual fantasies.”</p>
<p>“would you not consider that grounds for removal?”</p>
<p>Rape training? Maybe, since it’s violent. But I really don’t want the government getting into the business of deciding what non-violent ideologies are acceptable to teach your kids and which are not. The fact that they’re raising the kids to believe they ought to break the law is not, by itself, enough to justify removal in my book. What about civil rights leaders who raised their kids to revere breaking the law by sitting in at segregated lunch counters?</p>
<p>I think as this story unfolds, we will continue to learn of more and more abusive situations. The big one coming out today is the unusual amount of broken bones found in these kids through medical exams.</p>
<p>I agree that a great deal of care must be taken in mattes like this, but I believe that an ideological group that raises children to both flagrantly break the law and is widely known to practice - if not openly condone - abusive behavior to at least its teenage females (and probably more of the children, which we will see as the story unfolds more) is more than enough justification for pre-emptive action like this. Your other examples are indeed interesting, but we’re not talking about civil rights leaders and breaking segregation laws, and that example is fundamentally different.</p>
<p>“I think as this story unfolds, we will continue to learn of more and more abusive situations. The big one coming out today is the unusual amount of broken bones found in these kids through medical exams.”</p>
<p>Yes, lots of stuff like that will be served up to the press to justify the authorities’ action. We’ll have to wait to see what happens in court to see if there is really anything to it, though. Remember, we heard a lot of details about the poor girl who called in to report this situation–but it turned out she didn’t even exist.</p>
<p>You are obviously not a biologist.
Optimally the gestation needs to have sufficent nourishment.
An adolescent or child who is still growing, cannot get enough nourishment for proper development and feed the embryo.
The nursing mother also needs to provide nourishment to the infant until the infant is old enough to feed itself, about one or two years. Again providing milk is a huge stress upon the maternal body, and someone who does not have adaquate fat and food stores is not providing an optimal situation for an infant, because he counts on that mother for his food and protection.</p>
<p>Old sperm is also deterimental to the health of the fetus and child. So I’d say those kids are getting a bad deal all the way around.</p>
<p>When they start talking about evidence of broken bones, make sure you ask yourself how many kids out of any typical group would have broken bones. If these people were living a “pioneer” lifestyle, there might even be more broken bones, without any abuse at all.</p>
<p>If these people were living a “pioneer” lifestyle, there might even be more broken bones, without any abuse at all.</p>
<p>How so?
I have never broken a bone in my life.
My younger daughter who rock climbs, surfs, snowboards,skis,plays soccer, volleyball, and * rugby* has traveled to three continents , sustained a greenstick fracture to a wrist bone when she was five. Which occurred when she was running around in the yard with friends.</p>
<p>Older daughter, no broken bones, husband broke his knee when he was 36 and went off a ski jump without snow/made for a 23 year old.</p>
<p>Pioneers, ground their own flour and baked bread, are you telling me that those are high risk activities?</p>