Ping, new article.
“An attorney for FLDS families in Texas today challenged the state’s claim of a pervasive pattern of underage girls having children, saying the state’s own documents show that just two teenagers in custody are pregnant.
Snip
Of the three teenagers listed as pregnant, Parker said, one is about to turn 18 and another refused to take a pregnancy test, he said.
“That leaves us with one,” he said. Based on that list, Parker said, “I challenge the CPS to come forward with the pregnant minors.”
Chris Van Deusen, a CPS spokesman, said, “The only thing we can say is we’re aware that there are 20 girls who became pregnant, and they were between the ages of 13 and 16.
“That’s not to say that there are 20 now, but at the time theyconceived, they were 13, 14, 15 or 16,” he said. “That establishes that there is some sexual abuse here.”
Parker said the 20 minors the state has identified either as pregnant or mothers actually had children over a 10-year period.”
PING!!
FReepmail to be added to the FLDS Eldorado Legal Case Ping List
(Merril Jessop has retained a criminal defense attorney, according to the statement by Danny Hurley)
At the risk of spamming, and admitting that 10 is not 20, here’s the Dallas Morning News article, saying that there are currently 10 pregnant girls, not 2 or threehttp://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/texassouthwest/stories/DN-polygamists_23tex.ART.State.Edition2.4682227.html
and the Deseret News, which added 25 mothers under the age of 18 to the 17.
http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695273381,00.html
Lawyers are paid to tell the clients’ stories.
Black women have the highest teen pregnancy rate (134 per 1,000 women aged 15-19), followed by Hispanics (131 per 1,000) and non-Hispanic whites (48 per 1,000).
Sounds lower than “NORMAL” people.
Of course an FLDS lawyer is going to say they’re over 18! They’re going to try that on as many as they possibly can. Because then they can be represented by an FLDS lawyer and not a court appointed one. And because the fewer underage girls, the less men can be charged.
I wonder how many are actually like this something that happened in years past. The ranch is just a few years old so women like this one had the child in another state so I do not see what Texas can do except remove kids under civil law.
Actually, until VERY recently, one could MARRY in Texas at the age of 14, with parent’s consent. The cops FORGET that.
There have been LOTS of prego 14-year olds, legally married, in Texas in the past....and there are a TON of them NOW...UNMARRIED, in ghettos in Dallas, and Houston.
Pregnancy rates isn’t the issue. You can go into any high school in the nation and find 20 pregnant girls now, and the number will be much higher over the last 10 years.
If pregnancies are adequate reason to walk off with kids and close down organizations, then we’ll be closing down all the public high schools (and many private ones) in the next month or so.
The issues are that:
a. The kids don’t know their moms and the moms don’t know their kids or they aren’t talking. It is NECESSARY to sort that out to establish parentage/responsibility. You can’t just assign some kid to some lady because you like their hair color.
b. This place has something like 400+ girls to about 24 boys. That is odd. How does that accidentally happen? And if it isn’t accidental, then how has it been brought about.....selective abortion of males?? Sending males off someplace??? Tiny little male graves??? Some odd genetic factor???
A rather sad situation. Hopefully, the children will be reunited with their families soon. Unfortunately for them, this will likely devolve into a bonfire of the vanities similiar to the Duke affair.
I wouldn’t take this too seriously. CPS would only present the court with a count of those girls who had already been definitively documented to be both underage and pregnant. The information this FLDS attorney is referring to is almost a week old. They were still testing and interviewing and trying to wade through all the misinformation that the women and children were giving them. A lot of pregnant girls were still claiming to be over 18, and had not yet undergone testing such as Xrays to try to determine their real ages. Seems a lot them got younger in a big hurry when they found out it would let them stay with their infants and toddlers.
Then you too could be facing a CPS who would say something like this:
Chris Van Deusen, a CPS spokesman, said, "The only thing we can say is we're aware that there are 20 girls who became pregnant, and they were between the ages of 13 and 16. "That's not to say that there are 20 now, but at the time they conceived, they were 13, 14, 15 or 16," he said. "That establishes that there is some sexual abuse here."
As I said, most certainly not the case here, but I just want to illustrate that there is no logic in the argument that, because girls under 18 had children, there MUST have been sexual abuse.
As I have said before, in my daughter's middle school there were more than one girl who was pregnant or had a kid. That's 12-14 year-olds. Nobody filed charges of sex abuse.
And again I'll say, this is certainly not the same as THIS case. This case is DIFFERENT.
....and just how many teenaged girls get pregnant at the local high school every year and have an abortion?... or, keep the kid and collect welfare?
Have they prosecuted Britany Spears’ prego younger sister yet? Or is this selective enforcement of chastity laws?