14-Year-Old Arrested After Her Newborn Suffocates

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There isn't enough information to know if she did anything wrong. If she intentionally killed her baby then I think there should be some kind of repercussions, but not if it was an accidental death. I definitely don't think she should serve life in prison either way, but if her act was criminal then perhaps she should be in a juvenile facility where she can attend school for some amount of time, or perhaps a psychiatric facility (hopefully a good quality one) if she needs that kind of help. Now, if this is something she's done more than once, maybe a life sentence, but I doubt it.

To the OP: what is your fascination with these types of stories? You do post them a lot.

In general: several governments have recognized that women are not always "sane" immediately before, during and after the birth process and have adjusted their laws accordingly. There is a lot of evidence that certain women at that point of time can and will do things that they wouldn't have dreamed of under any other circumstances, and can have a lot of trouble distinguishing reality from fantasy. You don't know if what she did was criminal unless you can get inside her head, and you can't. Everything about the situation defies thinking rationally - the hormones, the pain, the blood; I was in a hospital with quality care when I gave birth and I still can't say I was thinking completely rationally.

As for forum sorting: I agree with the poster who said this is not a General Autism topic. The proper forum would be News and Current Events. I am, however, tired of moving threads at the moment and, so, unless the lack of order is really bothering multiple members, will ask the OP to think a little harder about placement next time instead.

If I were the cops, I would be more interested in talking to the guy who got her pregnant in the first place.

Why? He was not presant when the baby was born, at least they did not mention it. I am sure he was just as shocked as everyone else or he is a selfish jerk who sees it as dodging a bullet. The only thing a cop could do is tell him to quit having unprotected sex.

If I was a cop I would be making sure to make the adult who told them to throw out the baby a hell of a time. I would also tell the girl's parents to sue his ass for helping make their grandchild's final resting place a waste dump. I would also make sure to get his name in the paper and tv news agencies so he could be made to feel shame for what he did.

She's 14. That's considered statutory rape in many countries. Depending on how old the father is, he could be in a serious amount of trouble.

what do OP means? okay i be more careful of my posting next time . i didn't realize i post horrific stories a lot,

i also want every one to think, if she had a special need would you think differently about it.
me i still would think the same they could of done something which they got an adult and he should of done way more then what he did,

"The infant's father is also a juvenile, but was not present at the birth and has not been charged."

Legal Dictionary
Main Entry: ju·ve·nile
Function: noun
an individual who is under an age fixed by law (as 18 years) at which he or she would be charged as an adult for a criminal act

I wonder if these news are even real in the first place, for one, convicting the young mother based on an 11 year old testimony? I mean, isn't that absurd enough?

OK, thank you for highlighting that. I missed the father's age in the article and was just pointing out that had he been over the legal age, he could be facing some serious charges.

Actually, where I am from, it doesn't matter about the age of the father at all; the age of consent only applies to females, so a guy the same age or younger could be charged with rape. It's unfair but it can happen.



Adj. 1. patronising
patronising - (used of behavior or attitude) characteristic of those who treat others with condescension

I´m sorry... These internet discussions are making me overly nervous.

An OP is an abbreviation for original poster.

oh okay thanks

Whatever

Last edited by LiendaBalla on 27 Jun 2010, 10:20 am, edited 1 time in total.

If a sane adult woman choose to give birth in some dark shed and made a point of refusing to contact a midwife then if something happened to the baby then I would be angry. But we are dealing with a bunch of children, I do not think that they did something good. At an early age I knew that if something horrible started to happen then I could phone for the fire service, medical help or the police.

So I am displeased with the chidren for not phoning 911 for some urgent medical advice and help, while they might need a strong talking to they should not be put in jail for life.

The adult who cleaned up the room, I think should face criminal charges.

I agree with this.

I know there are people here who reference how they were at 14 and say they would have known better. And they probably would. But not everyone matures at the same rate, not everyone has the same access to education, some people have parents who would abuse them at best if they got pregnant (yet not abuse the guy involved or hold him as responsible, the wonders of sexism, which I see echoed on this board with the guy who said if she got pregnant she deserves all she gets but again said nothing of the father). Not everyone is in the same situation.

When I was 14 I would have had parents that I could have told, providing I could muster the communication skills. But I knew a girl who had a whole lot of sex (and got raped several times, a lot of the sex she had being partly a response to having been raped in earlier childhood). She was often entrusting secrets to me about how she got raped and pregnant but miscarried. And we both had that unfortunate thing many teens have, of thinking we were adultlike in our ability to handle the world. I also had the added "benefit" of just barely entering stages of cognitive development that most people go through in very very early childhood, and therefore making even worse decisions than the average teen (and I also get crap from people who believe all teens are mature enough to make better decisions than I did, as if all teens or even all autistic teens are the same). And I was diagnosed towards the last part of my fourteenth year so I would not have been diagnosed (so it would not be in a news story like that if I had been, say, the friend of the pregnant girl).

And if that were the girl I knew, begging me to keep her pregnancy a secret from any adult who knew her parents, I might have had the bad judgment to consider telling someone (including 911) the worst idea possible. And I can also imagine not even realizing that the baby's death could be reversed. (At that age I was unaware most situations could be changed at all to the point my diagnostic papers referred to me as having a pathological degree of passivity, which was one of my shrink's top priorities in changing, although he never did figure out how.) And then if an adult told me they were going to hide the body, I'd have probably taken their word for it.

Would I need to be held responsible by someone if I had been the friend? Absolutely. Would I have had the cognitive skills and maturity necessary to understand what the right thing to do was and then do it? Possibly not. Not that I had no sense of right and wrong, but I lacked the ability to always figure out which was which in complex situations, which led to a lot of really bad consequences even without something like this going on. And while some of these things are due to being autistic -- (1) Just because the girls weren't diagnosed with anything doesn't mean they didn't have any conditions such as autism or mild fetal alcohol syndrome etc. which can cause delays in the skills required for good judgment (and even more severe conditions can get overlooked in many circumstances; I was not considered "mildly impaired" when I was diagnosed at that age) and (2) even nondisabled people mature at different rates and have different life circumstances such as poor education in such matters that could prevent them from having the sense and the information to make the right choice. They may have thought if the baby was dead already and an adult said to hide the body then there was nothing else to be done for the baby so nothing should be done other than try to avoid getting in trouble for having the baby at all.

So I absolutely agree. The girls need some really stern education in good judgement and priorities, and consequences appropriate to their level of development. The adult needs criminal charges.

Edited to add: Before anyone jumps on me for bringing autism into something having to do with right and wrong. I am not saying autism prevents having a conscience. I have always had a stronger conscience than most people and research shows autistic people know right from wrong if they can understand the situation involved. But the important point is understanding the situation. When I was a teenager, I had just entered the stage most people go through in toddlerhood where a person tests out reality versus fantasy (which I didn't know enough to go through beforehand, it required a level of abstraction I only acquired at puberty). I also had extreme, extreme passivity partly resulting from lack of awareness that a situation could be changed (so sometimes even if I knew something was wrong, I had to be externally made aware of other options before I could act on them). I was gullible and easily influenced, and if someone had said their parents finding out was the worst possible thing then I would not consider any course of action that would lead to their parents finding out. And I had real trouble keeping up with other people's thinking because I was so busy just working out what the literal facts of a situation were (as in the concrete physical reality -- I found and find it hard to get beyond the raw sensory components of a situation and figure out that this brownness and flatness in front of me is a table), that I would find it difficult to get beyond that into the story of what was happening and what to do about it. And I just know that given too much responsibility for a serious situation I could have hurt people without intending to. I did enough damage without being put into that situation. There really, really are autistic traits that can result in a person with a fully functioning conscience doing incredibly destructive things if put in the wrong situation.