Bramham Has Fun With Statistics

Daphne Bramham at the Vancouver Sun looks for any reason to deny people their freedom to marry. Here’s her latest on Bountiful, a community that has come under scrutiny during the Canadian poly trial, because some there practice polygyny. She cites some statistics.

The number of births alone is surprising -- 833 born to 215 mothers in 13 years in a community whose population is commonly estimated at around 1,000.

That’s fewer than four children per mother. A woman having four children over the course of 13 years is hardly shocking.

The most disturbing fact is that 85 mothers -- a third of the total -- were 18 or younger. That's seven times the provincial rate of teen moms.

Very interesting how this is worded, “18 and younger.” How many of those were 18? Plus, the age of consent in Canada is 16. So out of those “teen moms,” how many were under the age of 16? Why doesn’t Bramham tell us? Also notice that this means that two thirds of the mothers were age 19 and older. She cites the “provincial rate.” How many teen girls outside of Bountiful are having sex outside of marriage? My guess is that most of the wives in Bountiful are not getting abortions. What is the provincial abortion rate? Is is better for 17-year-olds to be having sex with multiple partners in casual encounters or with a husband who is bound to them?

Ideally, I think people should be age 25 or older when they marry, simply because they’ll know themselves better and have more life experience and perspective. But I would not be in favor of raising the legal age to marry.

Two of the teens had three children each by the time they were 18; 16 had two children each. That means one in 10 babies was born to a teenager.

This sounds a lot better than what we see in low-income urban areas, especially when you consider these teens are married and having children by the same husband, rather than unmarried and having children by different fathers, non of whom care about her, as seen in some areas.

And it's no secret that in Bountiful (as in most polygamous societies), the powerful older men have the most wives and the most children. The statistics support that.

Well, yeah, the longer you live the more children you can have. Of course the older men have more children. And wives are better off with more powerful husbands. If a heterosexual woman has a choice between marrying a man with more power or a man with less power, she’s more likely to marry the man with more power.

The age gap between the 215 mothers and the 142 fathers is slightly more than eight years. That's nearly double the regional average and an anomaly in B.C., where the average is 4.6 years.

It is much smaller than the gap in the Playboy Mansion, however. And doing the math, it looks like it breaks down so that there could be just as many monogamous fathers as polygynous fathers, with the polygynous fathers having two wives.

(Even though the legal age of sexual consent was raised to 16 from 14 in 2008, it bears noting that it's a criminal offence for someone in a position of trust or authority to have sexual relations with anyone under the age of 18.)

Well, I’d hope a wife could trust her husband.

It also bears noting that the legal age of marriage in B.C. is 18.

I find it a problem that someone has the freedom to consent to sex and other things, but not marriage.

Not that it matters. As Chief Justice Robert Bauman has repeatedly been told, most fundamentalist Mormon marriages are "spiritual" or "celestial" unions arranged by the prophet or his designate.

So… she’d be in favor of making them legally recognized?

As Bauman has also heard, women and girls are routinely moved between the fundamentalist Mormon communities for arranged marriages.

Woah, woah… moving to get married? Who ever heard or such a thing?

Look, I’m not a member or follower of the FLDS or any related group. I’m not saying I like everything going on in Bountiful. But I cringe when alarmism and broad-brushing is used to deny adults the freedom to choose their marriage partner(s).