How can it be that a 10 year old getting pregnant is common anywhere?EDIT: There is a story in the news. link given below.

mother of the ten year old sounds like someone has a ten year old child…..

do you have an article or something this is in reference to?

Can you post a link to the story?

Google gives a few results but here is the 1st one: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5h_GeAMeBK3epIi6NgZznXpQVO1Mw?docId=5569bb9e47124903a6329e6d63ca58ce
I haven’t read it yet.

I kind of don’t really get what you mean by “Does the mother of the 10 year old mean “getting married at 10 is common? ”

I think it depends on the culture around the globe from certain countries.There are some places around the globe in those certain countries where it is allowed for a grown man to marry a girl at such an age and make her pregnant.And I guess the parents accept it(even though in my opinion I think that mother wished her daughter wasn’t forced to marry and get pregnant by a grown male). I can’t really remember but I think a certain, some parts of India and some part in Africa it’s common(I read a book called An African Girl In Harlem, the East African girl was like 12 at the time thinking she was going to America for a better life and a education but was really made a bet by her dad to marry 40 yr old East African male). I don’t know why that occurs at all but I would never want my 10 yr old daughter getting pregnant by some older man.

It is one news story. That doesn’t make it common or a hoax. If it were common, it wouldn’t make the news.

In this particular story, the grandmother of the baby is presumably from Romania and living in Spain. Even though she states that it is “their custom to marry very young”, and that research states that “arranged “marriages” for girls reaching puberty are relatively common among Roma, who make up about 1.5 million of Romania’s 22 million people,” it also states that, “Those marriages are not recognized by the state, which requires girls to be 16 and have parental consent before they can marry.”

I got the news from the radio. The report was that the mother said that 10 year olds getting pregnant is not uncommon in Romania. And my friend who lives in another country wrote me this:
“Did you hear about the 10 year old child who gave birth ? She is a Romanian Gypsy and had the baby in Spain. I mention her ethnicity because her mother is surprised by all the attention—she said it’s not uncommon in her culture.No matter how physically developed the 10 year old is—that is way too young to be having sex let alone having a baby”.

So, it is the physiological part I was addressing in the OP. I would have sworn that it is an impossible or a unique occurence. I wasn’t refering to arranged marriages.

frizzer? cuz I just don’t understand the question.

Not all Romanians are gypsies. It may be common among Romanian gypsies, but the article does not confirm this. It is one woman’s opinion. As educated as I like to consdider myself, I admit that I have misconceptions based upon the limited communities I have experienced.

If you are looking for examples of children around the age of 10 who have become pregnant, I can share two. My sister is a 5th grade teacher in a public Virginia (US) school who had two students, between 10–11 years old that became pregnant. One carred the baby to term, and with the help of her mother, is rasing it. The other had an abortion. This was ~10 years ago.

I think there is some confusion here about the differences between the Romanians, The Romani and The Roma.

The article @flo links to is about a Roma girl in Spain and that article states:

She also said since they are Romanian Gypsies, or Roma, it is their custom to marry very young. Arranged “marriages” for girls reaching puberty are relatively common among Roma, who make up about 1.5 million of Romania’s 22 million people. Those marriages are not recognized by the state, which requires girls to be 16 and have parental consent before they can marry.

A small minority of Romanians are Roma

And the Roma themselves are a subgroup of the Romani

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roma_(Romani_subgroup)

The Romani

It’s very confusing but I think that’s how it works.

The article about the girl in Spain only talks about arrange marriages for young girls being common among the Roma.

The article gives the population of Roma in Romania at about three times what the Wikipedia article does, 2002 cenus numbers. I don’t which, if either, are right.

I mss Ari and Keysha. He could probably shed some light…

@Trillian Yes. I don’t know who Keysha is but Arisztid is Roma, or at least of Roma heritage, right? But I just checked… not been on since the middle of August. I don’t know Ari all that well but we had a few conversations some time back.

Have you seen any medical article about the physiological aspect of this? I see this as a medical story. A medical article is what I am looking for. It has to be an almost unique thing. I refuse to believe it is not uncommon, regardless of where. Something seems to be wrong with this picture to me.

@flo : There’s nothing wrong with it. Its their culture, and they live by it. Believe it or not, they actually marry off girls as soon as they hit puberty – that’s a really, really, really old custom. It happened in historical times, and its still happening now. So, she hit puberty, she got pregnant. Note: the father was 13, not 40 or something, which is slightly better in my opinion. At least she wasn’t raped.

You can’t project your views of another culture with your 21st century Americanized eyes because it just doesn’t work that way. Not everyone is American, or thinks with American ideals and morals and things like that.

For another thing, I used to live on an Indian reservation in Wisconsin, and there were girls who got pregnant at ten years old. This is in this century, in the 90s! I wasn’t alive, but my dad was their doctor. The girls were ignored until they had even hit puberty, and they weren’t worth anything. These are different cultures we’re talking about.

Besides that, if you “refuse” to acknowledge that a ten year old can have a baby, then why even ask this question? You’ve already made up your mind, so why waste your time?

@flo Do you mean that you find it a fluke that a 10 year old girl became pregnant and are looking for examples/articles that provide statistics about how common it is?

@Pied_Pfeffer yes, that is it. Researchers keep records of everything including what the youngest age of pregnant person is. What do the most reliable medical journals, have in their records about it? Don’t the medical correspondents on news networks pursue these kinds of stories?
I am not referring to rightness and and wrongness about getting married early in any culture .
I just think some people exaggerate to get attention. So, not uncommon is….
Culture does not trump biology.

@flo: Even if culture doesn’t trump biology, miracles do happen. The girl and her baby survived, and they’re both healthy. Isn’t that what really matters?

@flo Here, here, and here are articles that discusses puberty and when girls enter puberty. While 10–12 is about average for entering puberty, girls have been starting puberty at younger ages than before. According to these articles, some girls start puberty as young as 6 or 7 (so medically it’s very possible for them to get pregnant at 10).

Here is a wiki list of the youngest birth mothers. All of the girls listed are under 12 and you can see where they were and when it happened.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any actual statistics for the number of girls getting pregnant at 10-years-old, instead all of that information seems to be combined with the numbers for teen pregnancy. I believe the rise in pregnancy in younger girls is because of puberty starting earlier.

@Seaofclouds Thank you for providing those links/ response. I appreciate it. It is sickenng to think of girls that age getting pregnant. And I can see the pedophiles knowing this kind of info, that and liking it.

@flo Pedophiles are always a concern, but that has nothing to do with a female reaching puberty. They can be male or female and can be attracted to either gender. It appears to be all about manipulation, secduction and power, with sexual gratification being somewhere lower on the list. I doubt that the last thing a pedophile has any interest in is a female who has reached puberty and could become pregnant.

As mentioned in an earlier post, my sister had to deal with two of her 5th grade students (10–11 year-olds) who became pregnant. This was about 10 years ago. One opted to keep the baby while the other went through an abortion. Both, as far as my sister knows, were inpregnated by boys and not pedophiles, nor friends/relations of the family. I doubt that any of the girls or their partners had any idea of the risks that they were taking.

If there should be any type of concern about sexual relations at a young age, it needs to come through education of not only the children but parents. There was a question posted on Fluther in the past couple of months regarding how long it would take before a pregnancy test could be conducted before it could be considered accurate. Some of the answers were shocking, considering that they were coming from adults in situations where you’d think that we would know without having to look it up (as I had to do). There are enough women on the planet willing to tell their tale for I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant to make a television series out of it. If the adults cannot figure it out, how can we expect the youth to?

Pedophiles and rapists make the news, as they rightfully should. Unfortunately, they are viewed as horrors and one-offs. I don’t know what is covered in discussions with the youth of today, both male and female, but it doesn’t seem to the proper information and delivered earlier enough.

@flo, @Pied_Pfeffer : This guy wasn’t a pedophile, he was thirteen.

@Pied_Pfeffer you are right. pedophiles don’t need excuses to do what they do, they don’t care about puberty or no puberty. I was just mentioning them as an aside. As in I imagine just the mere mention of children involved in sexual activity would make them feel happy, whether it with them or not.

The fact that children (even16 year olds) are loosing their childhood at that age is bad enough, regardless of how old the father is. But at 10!....
No question about the lack of education.

@troubleinharlem We know, or at least assume, that the boyfriend wasn’t a pedophile. flo’s point is that a public list of children who have been sexually active might arouse some pedophile’s, umm, imagination. Mine is that pedophila tendencies aren’t limited to adults and probably aren’t out to get their victim pregnant. Please forgive us…we just got off-topic a bit.