Posted on 07/21/2007 9:14:00 AM PDT by wagglebee
Planned Barrenhood doesn't actually care about women and they really don't care about women in the Third World.
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I really don’t know what to think about this; I just don’t know enough.
In the US, young marriages are inadvisable. But, I remember reading of young marriages in the 1700’s, etc..
As far as third-world countries go, I can imagine where a young marriage is a good thing. I just don’t know, so won’t judge them at this great distance.
Does anybody have more information that is objective?
I’m not sure that I would call marriage in rural agrarian cultures with the girl being 15-19 a child marriage.
15 is very young no doubt but this sort of thing was quite common here not long ago
My maternal grandmother was married at 15 and my paternal grandmother at 14....and both had long marriages and lives.
and at least they got married and had little or no sex outside of marriage since folks back then understood better the ramifications for unmarried pregnant girls.
Child marriage to me is more Mohammed and his 9 year old.
I disagree, esp if they make a baby. There is this ugly, dark secret called responsibility that more people need to know about.
Including their brains.
The US cannot address Female Genitalia Mutilation as a crime in our own country. How do you expect we can offer ‘hopes and aspirations’ to the third world women?
(50 million female fetuses have been aborted in India in the past 20 years because they see them as a liability)
A person is old enough for sex when that person is married and physically, emotionally, and financial prepared to be a mother or father.
To some extent, this is culturally flexible: My 16-year-old has the skills (if not the disposition :-), to be a wife and mother, but it’s not a particularly wise choice in our culture, given all the alternatives.
However, a hundred or two hundred years ago, marriage at 16 might have been good choice for her, depending on the available husband-material.
It’s kind of a tangent, but pushing for delaying marriage, beyond a certain point, goes empirically against CWA’s goals of reducing promiscuity, out-of-wedlock births, and abortion.
Your daughter is going to be thrilled to read that you want to marry her off as soon as you can find suitable “husband material”!!! :-)
Both of my grandmothers married at 16, because that is when they graduated high school. My grandfathers were both in their early 20’s and gainfully employed.
As far as physical “readiness” goes, girls are maturing at an earlier age now (because of all the hormones in their diets), so that argument doesn’t wash.
The key is can they support themselves. Today in the U.S. teenagers just can’t support themselves, let alone a family.
As I recall, the age of consent under English common law was 10 years.
Does anybody have more information that is objective?
Your request for more information before rendering an opinion is commendable. Would that more folks would do so.
There’s a huge difference between forced marriage of a young girl to an older man, and teenagers having sex because they want to. And what CWA is missing is that one of the big reasons for child marriage is the sick mentality that a woman has no value unless she delivered to her husband as a virgin. The idea is to marry them off very young to be sure they don’t have sex before you can sell them (because in the countries where forced child marriage is prevalent, brides are indeed sold).
“A person is old enough for sex when that person is married and physically, emotionally, and financial prepared to be a mother or father.”
There are many who never reach that point of maturity and yet marry. I am pretty sure to be right based on the 50% of marriages that fail.
mohammad married a 7 year old, so it's OK.
(Although in all fairness I must mention that he didn't, uh, consummate the marriage until she was 9. What a guy)...
In the 1700's, all we had were agricultural societies, for the most part. Young marriage gives a chance to get started on an agrarian lifestyle that does not require large amounts of education.
Once the rest of the world gets industrialized, this problem will take care of itself, but not before. Westerners 'persuading' Third Worlders to 'do the right thing as we see fit' are going to just hit a brick wall.
I got married at 38. It was bad. VERY bad.
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