About those pregnant FLDS minors ...

In an earlier post, I pointed out that the Texas authorities were being deliberately dishonest by making statements about how many girls of what age were pregnant or mothers while refusing to accept birth ceritificates as evidence of age. They have now conceded that both of the "minors" who gave birth while in state custody were actually adults. One of them was eighteen, the other twenty-two. An early report of the authorities' claims about supposed minors supposedly aged 14-17 included the assertion that two were pregnant. If so, the number is now down to zero.

Twenty-four more of the supposed minors claim to be adults. The CNN story I linked to, considering what might happen if those women are eliminated from the count of minors with children, concludes that there would be left:

"... about one-fifth of the girls that age found at the ranch -- substantially higher than the average rate of teen pregnancies in Texas but a far cry from 60 percent."

According to webbed figures from the Guttmacher Institute, about 6% of Texas girls aged 15-19 get pregnant each year. They don't give a figure for 14-17, which is the age range being claimed for the FLDS mothers, but the national figure for that age range is about 4% and Texas has one of the higher teen pregnancy rates so it might be 6%. The relevant figure for comparison is not, as CNN seems to imply, the number who get pregnant each year but the number who have ever been pregnant, which should be substantially higher. On the simplest assumption--that the pregnancy rate is constant and the age distribution of the FLDS girls is flat--that would be about 12%.

Having held them in Texas until they had their children on the unsupported, and now concededly false, claim that they were minors, the state is now claiming custody over their infants.

The question, to which someone who knows law better than I do may have an answer, is whether the victims of this abuse of legal process have any legal recourse. On the face of it, the state of Texas either deliberately or negligently violated the rights of both women, holding them prisoner without any legal justification for doing so.

What follows? I do not know. If I were a member of the FLDS, I would be looking for some way of getting the case out of the Texas courts and into federal court. One possibility would be to argue that Texas is deliberately attempting to suppress a religion, using fraudulent claims as an excuse, and is thus in violation of the First Amendment.