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Right... So the British way is always the best? :rolleyes: I think it's patronising not to learn about other cultures and to tell them how to live their lives because we think it's right. Even though we have no idea of their experiences.
So you think it's Ok to go telling other cultures they're wrong? That's quite offensive. Or did somebody make you God quite recently?
Morals are human constructs. Just because you believe something does not make millions of people who think otherwise wrong.
If other cultures consider 13 year olds to be adults, then they are wrong. It is not condescending. A thirteen year old is not the equal of an adult in terms of physical, emotional, or mental maturity. The fact that her reproductive system has matured, and that she can have babies does not make her an adult. At thirteen she is still growing mentally, emotionally and even physically. You seem to half agree with me when you say she has to 'act like a woman'. She may have to 'act like a woman', but she isn't one, she's acting.
I didn't say 'the British way is always the best', it isn't, and we can learn lots from other cultures. I just say that there is such a thing as objective truth, and it is objectively true that a 13 year old is not an adult, the Argentines are wrong if they think a 13 year old is an adult. That doesn't mean that other cultures can't be right about other things which we are wrong about.
They probably would find it quite offensive if we went around telling them they're wrong, but that doesn't mean that they're not wrong. We can tell them they're wrong tactfully, like the government say they're doing with the Saudi king. Doing it that way is more likely to convince them that they're wrong.
And just because they think otherwise does not make them right either. Right and wrong aren't subjective, either they're right and we're wrong, or we're right and they're wrong.
roughly
13 year olds make bad decisions, so do 16 year olds, so do 25 year olds, so do 50 year olds.
The problem with this case is that shes had 7 children she didnt even want because she lives in a country with anti contraception and anti abortion policies.
With policies like that, i damn well hope theyre providing the victims of it some sort of support and housing
well said.
The only objective truth that applies universally is scientific truth. And there certainly is a scientific truth about when women are ready to have a baby, and I think you know when that is. All other defintions of woman (i.e. maturity, ability to support a child) apply only in the society in which they are thought up. A "woman" in the UK if far older than a "woman" in some tribe in Papau New Guinea, because obviously the latter would be far more capable of supporting a child in her teenage years in the society in which she lives.
But of course, in Argentina, this girl isn't a woman by local definition.
It was a rhetorical question designed to focus the debate rather than pinning all the blame on the girl for being stupid and incompetent and not using a 'rampant rabbit'.
What I was trying to do was illustrate that there is a lot of factors that contributed towards it, it's not an ideal situation and probably not one that was desirable for the mother, the extended family nor the state.
But that is now irrelevent since the children are alive and well and need looking after, the state has taken the right actions in putting their welfare first.
Yes, in the grand scheme children should be brought into families that can support them and aren't dependent on the state (afterall, what would happen if the state collapsed? who you gonna call?) but the fact is that doesn't always happen and this is just an extreme situation picked up by the media because the love to spread a bit of gossip and say how shocking it is, when really it's not their right to. Why can't we have a bit of decency and say 'well, it's not the most convenient of situations, but that's life' rather than spread it all over the tabloids and go OH MY GOD.
By 'we' I mean the establishment, rather than people here. It's demand driven media, because people love a scandal.
I think quite a few of us would faint every 30 seconds walking round some town in Victorian England. One of the main reasons the age of consent was raised from 13 to 16 was to prevent the child prostitution that was prevailent at the time. People have such romantic views of the 19th century that are so so far from the truth, at least for the majority of the population then....
A lot went on during Victorian times. It was just ignored or at least confined to parts of the city that Good People pretended did not exist.
I just had to read about this, so did a quick internet search:
http://home.pacbell.net/tonyprey/burning/vicera.htm
(Victorian Era)
Utterly gobsmacked...
It still happens at the moment. It's just now we have planes, so people fuck off to Cambodia for it instead, and we can live safe in the knowledge that we're a nice moral country. :rolleyes:
Firstly, contraception IS available in Argentina: anyone can walk into a pharmacy and buy a packet of pills or condoms, what isn't as widely available (thanks to the lobby of the Catholic Church) is emergency contraception, as another poster has well mentioned, or abortion.
So, while I don't deny for one minute that the Catholic Church has a role to play in the present girl's situation, putting it down to their opposition of contraception is highly simplistic imo.
What I think people are having difficulty in grasping here is the full reality of being poor and isolated in a country like Argentina. No offense, but people are being very Eurocentric in their analysis of things. Personally I would put the situation down to underdevelopment more than anything else - more than access to contraceptive methods or not.
Being poor in Argentina (like in many countries in South America) means less access to everything: education, health, work, services, and in case of the indigent - basics like housing, food and water. Growing up in conditions like this means you develop quite good survival skills, but in detriment of other skills like the ability to plan ahead. When you have so little you just live by the day - you work for this day's salary, for this day's food. Tomorrow will take care of tomorrow. And so on. For someone who has never suffered from hunger out of poverty this may be difficult to grasp, but when you have grown up like this you learn to think in the same way: even more so because abilities like planning ahead are learnt from parental modeling. So, not only are you in a living condition that forces you to focus on the present but you also lack the model for learning differently. I don't mean to say that they don't have the capacity of planning ahead - just that they have been largely disfavoured by their circumstances for learning certain skills that the rest of society takes for granted, and which might have influenced the girl in this case to find herself in the present situation.
So, on this subject I would say it's much more of a case of not reflecting on the consequences of certain actions than non-access to contraception (as a trip to the pharmacy or maybe even the local health centre would get her (and him!) supplied with pills and/or condoms). And accenctuate this for adolescents, who are much more impulsive by nature.
Secondly, if you live in a rural area, then add extra to the isolation, which means even less access to education, information, services and the like. While in developing countries like Argentina you can find the big cities quite up to level with the current times, if you step into a rural area you will find like you have travelled 20 years back in time. That means the information that circulates there is 20 years behind - thus, even when condoms/pills are available on the counter, many people don't even know how to use them correctly. The levels of misinformation on this are so that you wouldn't believe. In these parts what today we talk about as myths are common-believed facts. For example, you get the teenagers saying how they can 'control' not getting the girl pregnant when on intercourse, or even the common belief that using a condom makes them somehow 'less macho'. For this reason you get many girls pregnant because their boyfriends refuse to wear condoms. Or you get the girls thinking that going on the pill will make you sterile, and even the girls who are willing to go on it it's a miracle if they actually know how to -and manage- to take it correctly. When you are a young girl struggling to have a normal teenage life whilst at the same time running the house because there is no father so the mother works outside, while you have to take care of younger siblings, trying to keep up with your studies, going to bed on an empty stomach because that day there wasn't simply enough to go around, not knowing if tomorrow will be different, plus all the difficulties that adolescence itself alone brings - yeah, sometimes it's hard to be constant and responsible, and having some sex to take your mind off such hardships or even -God forbid- have fun for a while, is hardly surprising.
Hell take a look at this very website even: it's here to provide young people with information. Even in a country like the UK where public education levels are a million times higher than in South America there are gaps to be filled, you can only imagine the levels of disinformation over there, where they have no resources to turn to.
So yeah, I'd say it's basically much more a case of general underdevelopment (and thus less access to general information, education, lifestyle, cultural background, etc) than anything else. And remember, these are only three pregnancies we are talking about, not seven separate ones. Hardly extreme anyway.
As far as I know it is a well-documented fact that birthcontrol arrives with development. In fact, it's a characteristic of a developed country.
I don't think it's a symptom of a developed country, I think it's actually a cause of a developed country too. Not contraception by itself, but the equal rights of women, of which the freedom (and education) to choose contraception is a key part. That's why people who professed to spend their life tackling poverty, such as mother Teresa did nothing of the sort, but went a long way to prolonging it with their rejection of women's rights.
She's a wind up merchant.
Well, I figured that.
Like I said before: I DO think the Catholic Church has a part to play, but not as big one as the economical and political conditions of the country.
Anyway I'm leaving this up to here as I think I've said all I have to say on the subject tbh. To go on would be to just continue repeating myself.