A recent AP article on FLDS has something very peculiar — it has some numbers! In addition to trumpeting the “31 underage moms” in a way that makes me think that they don’t really have any pregnant girls under 16, they have an actual breakdown of children and ages.
Of the 463 children, 250 are girls and 213 are boys. Children 13 and younger are about evenly split - 197 girls and 196 boys - but there are only 17 boys aged 14 to 17 compared with the 53 girls in that age range.
I think this cleanly rules out female-biased infanticide.
Why so few older boys? As one commentator put it, one of the ways you control the population is by making the place very attractive to women and relatively unpleasant for men. Women tend to stay, boys tend to go.
The whole thing about how they don’t actually force their children to remain FLDS is also pretty telling — it makes it a lot harder to say that women are being forced to offer their daughters up for weddings.
[Edit: Scott Henson suggests that the underage mom count includes 26 18-year-olds whom the CPS is calling "17-year-olds".]
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10 Responses:
April 29th, 2008 at 8:05 am
The article I read also said that 31 of those 53 girls between 14 and 17 were either pregnant or had children.
April 29th, 2008 at 8:33 am
That’s just it: we don’t know how many 14 or 15 year olds are in the category of ‘either pregnant or had children’ or if they were included to imply that girls under 16 had been pregnant. It could be that all 31 of those girls are 16 and 17. This sort of misleading statistic is the exact same kind of cr@p that the CPS keeps trotting out since this fiasco began.
If any 14- or 15-year-olds were found to have been pregnant, that would have been the number that they would have trumpeted. I don’t think they found any, and were left with manufacturing a nice-sounding value, probably enhanced by ‘accidentally’ co-opting a few young-looking, 18-year-olds for good measure.
April 29th, 2008 at 10:20 am
the usual pregnancy rate for that age group in the US for the last 40 years has been ~6-7% (according to this, actually it’s dropped to ~4% for the last decade)
April 29th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
The BBC has picked up on this. I don’t know how long they have been covering it. I suspect that http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,550063,00.html” rel=”nofollow”>this very vile incest/imprisonment case in Austria may have been the trigger for them.
The increasing desperation of DFPS to justify this smelly little pogrom probably indicates that they have finally realized just how badly they’ve screwed the pooch on this. Too bad TxACLU doesn’t seem to have the testicular fortitude to jump on this with both feet.
April 29th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Texas has the highest rate of teen births and the highest rate of two births to teens — so really the percentage of these teens at the compound isn’t that much different than the percentage of teens in general in texas that are having babies.
April 29th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Texas has the highest teen birth rate in the nation (63 births per 1,000 females ages 15-19) according to the KIDS COUNT Data Book, a national state-by-state report released today by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. This report is a precursor to the fall release of The State of Texas Children 2007, which will provide child well-being data for every county in Texas. Despite improving by 9 percent between 2000 and 2004, Texas has the nation’s worst birth rate, with more than 51,000 births to Texas teens (or 63 births per 1,000 teens). Nationally, there are 41 births for every 1,000 teens.
April 29th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Yeah, but these kids might have been fathered by squirrelly, old men. Doesn’t that mere potential excite you to some sort of indignation?