Motherless Children At The Border

More than 52,000 unaccompanied minors have been arrested since October after entering the United States illegally, mostly from Central America.
*Photo from latimes.com

That’s a 99 percent increase over the same period a year earlier and the U.S. has been grappling with logistics and strategies for stopping the flow of children and providing for their immediate and ongoing needs.

The parents who send their children to the U.S. are largely acting on rumors that if they make it to the U.S., they’ll be allowed to stay here. Their home countries are poverty stricken and plagued with drugs and gang violence. They are entrusting that smugglers will transport their children to relatives already living in the U.S. who they hope will provide their children the chance to live safer, healthier lives and brighter futures than they’d have if they remained in their birth countries. They are gambling on a better life for their children and it’s costing these families more than they have but they clearly feel it’s worth the risk. For about three-quarters of the children who have been arrested in South Texas, the life they’re now living is not the better life they’d hoped for. Instead, these tens of thousands of children, many as young as infants, are being housed in facilities with inadequate social services, sanitation or supervision and with uncertain futures.

Why do we care? Because, we’re thinking about the mothers. Rather than judging or vilifying them, we know there are limiting and desperate circumstances that might justify taking such extreme measures. Being a girl in many parts of the world, including parts of Central America, is extremely dangerous. If a girl survives childhood, chances are great that she will become a mother long before her body is ready. For these women, it’s rarely a choice whether or not to have children and if it is, it is not because they are equipped to provide for that child but because having a baby and becoming a mother might be the only thing that gives them a sense of purpose or hope.

Many of the countries these children are coming from are not only poor, they’re religious and conservative. Poor and indigent women don’t have access to reproductive healthcare or family planning services. They don’t have the luxury to decide if, when and how many children they’ll mother. When mothers have more children than they can feed, educate, protect and support, they sometimes have to make tragic, heartbreaking decisions, like placing them in the hands of strangers to take them to America, where they’ve heard there will be opportunities that could alter the cycle of poverty they were born to.

Here are a few facts that might shed some light on this desperate situation:

1. Teen Pregnancy — The World Bank says that Latin America and the Caribbean have the third highest teen pregnancy rate in the world at 72 per 1000 births.

There’s a direct correlation between high poverty rates, lack of opportunity and high teen pregnancy rates.

2. Violence against Women — UN Women/UNIFEM says: Due to the rapid growth of many cities in Latin America, social exclusion, inequality and violence against women have significantly increased:

• According to the Pan American Health Organization, 1 out of 3 women is abused in the course of her life.
• Among women ages 15–44, gender-based violence causes more deaths and injuries than cancer, malaria, traffic accidents and war.

3. Unmet Need for Contraceptives: The UN says that many countries in Latin America have unmet needs for contraceptives above 20%. The Guttmacher Institute estimates 23% of women in Latin America want contraception but can’t access it.

4. Child Mortality Rates for Children Under 5:

• El Salvador — 16 children die out of every 1000
• Guatemala — 32 children die/1000
• Honduras — 23 children die/1000
• United States — 7 children die/1000