More than half of cult teen girls pregnant or mothers

San Antonio Express-News/Houston Chronicle:

More than half the teenage girls removed from a West Texas polygamist sect are either pregnant or have children, state officials said today.

Thirty-one of the 53 girls between the ages of 14 and 17 are either mothers or expectant mothers, Stephanie Goodman, a spokeswoman for the state's Health and Human Services Commission, said this afternoon.

A state district judge in San Angelo ordered into state custody all the children removed from the West Texas compound near Eldorado, which is run by members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

The Department of Family and Protective Services has upped its total count of the children removed by one since Friday, to 463, the Associated Press reported today.

The state alleges the sect marries underage girls to much older men - and essentially puts all the children at risk by exposing them to unlawful practices.

Texas law allows girls to marry at 16 or 17 only if they have parental consent or a court order. Children under 16 cannot marry unless there is a court order.

It was not immediately clear how many of the 31 girls cited by Goodman on Monday were 16 and under and how many 16-year-olds might have married with their parents' consent.

Earlier, the state’s 3rd Texas Court of Appeals refused to immediately intervene in the custody dispute between the state and parents of the children seized three weeks ago.

The court cited "insufficient information" to warrant granting emergency relief to attorneys representing 48 mothers who are followers of the church, a breakaway Mormon sect.

...

There are 27 girls between 14 and 17 and another 34 between 10 and 13. There are over 100 kids below the age of two. There are another 26 girls who have recently admitted they are under 18, but their age has not been given. These 26 originally said they were over 18. All of them have babies.

The Appeals court is going to give the trial court and the Child Protective Service make their case before they intervene. The court also canceled a hearing set for Tuesday. There is no mention of the status of the DNA test, but I think the results will be critical to this case.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more

Bin Laden's concern about Zarqawi's remains

James Robbins: ... Bin Laden suggests that President Bush should allow Zarqawi’s body to be returned to his family in Jordan, but this is a matter that is up to the Jordanian government, which so far has not shown much interest in facilitating a homecoming. Bin Laden mocks King Abdullah II, calling him a Coalition minion, and asking “w hat scares you about Abu Musab after he’s dead? You know that his funeral, if allowed to happen, would be a huge funeral showing the extent of sympathy with the mujahedin.” A large crowd would definitely turn out, though most people would be on hand to demonstrate their anger and disgust. Last November’s hotel bombings in Amman , masterminded by Zarqawi, are still fresh in people’s memory, and mentioning them to Jordanians has the same visceral impact as memory of the 9/11 attacks does here. Jordan has adopted a zero-tolerance policy towards those who choose to mourn the country’s least favorite son, and four opposition members of parliament who paid con
Read more