Will Global Warming Solve the Fertility Crisis?
Is Climate Change causing Child Marriage?
From the Australian Broadcasting Company:
Climate change becoming a major driver of child marriage across Asia and the Pacific
What can’t climate change do? It’s a floor wax and a desert topping!
By Claire Campbell
Thursday 9 July
In short:
The growing intensity of natural disasters across Asia is leading to increasing numbers of child marriages of girls, according to aid organisations.
They’re worried this year’s El Niño could exacerbate the issue of child marriage.
What’s next?
Advocates are calling for funding and resources around child marriage to be better integrated into climate change response and resilience programs.
Runa was 15 when she married a man she had never met.
Cyclone Remal had ripped through her camp in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar region, killing her family’s chickens and ducks, which were the source of both their food and income.
Runa’s mother, who had become the sole income earner after her husband died a year earlier, then lost weeks of labouring work due to the natural disaster.
She could no longer financially support Runa, now 17, and her three brothers.
“She felt she had no choice but to arrange my marriage,” Runa told the ABC.
Twelve million girls are tipped to become child brides this year, according to Plan International.
Plan International defines a child bride as female who gets married before her 18th birthday. That would include Marilyn Monroe. Barack Obama Jr.’s mother was impregnated at age 17, but didn’t start to show until she was 18 when she briefly married Barack Obama Sr.
During the 1950s, about 16% of American females who got married were less than 18. (Presumably, a large fraction were pregnant or had recently given birth or appeared likely to get pregnant shortly.)
One thing to keep in mind is that the very young average age of marriage during the Baby Boom, for both females and males, wasn’t traditional in English-speaking world. Economic historian Gregory Clark’s research shows the average age of marriage for females in England in 1200-1800 bounced around between 24 and 26. Only the rich married young. For everybody else, delaying marriage was the main technique for keeping the population below the Malthusian ceiling. And it was a successful technique: England hasn’t had a major killer famine since the 1310s.
But during the Baby Boom, Americans didn’t have to worry about traditional constraints. We’d just won the Big One, and the American masses were now the richest people in the history of humanity.
In earlier times, puberty appears often to have arrived later due to nutritional shortcomings. But postwar American youths grew up being driven to the hamburger stand.
Lots of teenage girls were getting knocked up on the ride home, and getting a quick marriage a few months later. Here’s Chuck Berry’s last great song, written while he was in prison in the early 1960s:
Paywall here.
