The recent motherhood of a 10 year old girl in Jerez has caused consternation and much opinion in the Spanish media. The girl, a Romanian Gypsy, arrived in Spain ostensibly for a family wedding, but happened to give birth while she was here. There are an awful lot of comments throughout the Internet on this, mostly of the 'we need a Sarkozy plan in Spain to deal with them' variety. But there is not much news about the father, though the girl's family supposedly says that he is supposedly a 13 year old boy and that the relationship was supposedly consensual. At age 10?
The child bearing a child goes from playing with dolls -that's a doll up there, a better alternative to a real baby, I feel- to playing with her baby, a real live baby not entirely unlike the one up there but without that essential element called responsibility. Maybe both at the same time.
In any case, the child mother jumps from, yes, childhood straight into adulthood without the physical, mental or emotional wherewithal to cope. And without passing through the terrible, awesome, frightening, abominable teenage years that provide so much of that wherewithal but far from all.
Evidently the mother is in no condition to take care of her child but one thing is true about her ethnicity: for the most part, the extended famly is very much part of their culture. Whether the extended family in Romania was keeping an eye on the kid -the mother- is another matter, but one that should be investigated by the authorities in that country.
According to the latest figures I could find, 178 girls under the age of 15 gave birth in Spain in 2008. The number of such cases has not gone below 80 per year since 1990. This figure does not take into account the number of unreported cases or those that were interrupted through abortion.
What does the future hold, then, for these two children, mother and daughter? Much the same as for any family that lives from begging in the streets.
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