Child Mother

Aristocrats among Amerindians are the Creeks, one of the five oldtime "civilized tribes." An aristocrat among Creeks is Juanita Deere McClish. Plump, pretty, full-lipped, she is 5 ft. tall, weighs 88 lb., will be 12 years old next June. Her widowed mother, Woosey Deere, owns 160 acres dotted with oil wells worth $650,000. They live in a $45,000 brick house near Sapulpa, Okla. on a neatly landscaped estate equipped with a garage for their three expensive automobiles. At Bacone Indian College & School in Muskogee, Okla. last year Juanita met and loved Buster McClish, 18, a Choctaw farmer boy from southern Oklahoma. With a baby on the way they decided they had better get married. Mother Woosey, who was a grandmother at 29, was sympathetic. Choctaw Indians are not oil-rich and Buster's parents readily gave consent. There was only one obstacle. Even in the ten States* which permit girls of 12 to marry. Juanita would have been too young. Oklahoma, however, forbids marriage of girls under 15. But when the urgency of the case was explained to a district judge at Sapulpa he granted a special dispensation. Last November Juanita and Buster were married. In Sapulpa Hospital one night last week Juanita lay in childbed. As her labor pains mounted physicians saw that, because her pelvic bones were still immature, a normal delivery would be difficult, if not dangerous. They decided on a caesarean section. But Juanita's grandmother Annie Dick, who remembers when squaws had babies with less fuss than a hen laying an egg, stood out against it. All night long the physicians argued with her, pointing out that Indian girls of Juanita's generation no longer live the hardworking, outdoor lives of their grandmothers which made for small babies, easy deliveries. Just after dawn Grandmother Annie gave in. The physicians promptly sliced open Juanita's womb, delivered her of a healthy 9 1/2lb. boy. Physicians thought that Juanita was probably the youngest woman ever to undergo a caesarean section. But they could not claim that she was the youngest woman ever to become a mother. Woman's capacity to bear children begins at puberty. That comes earliest in hot climates, latest in cold, with ages rang ing from 9 or 10 in some parts of South America to 17 or 18 in Lapland. A survey some years ago indicated that the average age of puberty in the U. S. was 13. Authorities believe that it is now going down, especially among the well-nurtured upper classes. Few years ago Katherine Mayo (Mother India} set out to expose India's child marriages, horrified the U. S. and infuriated Indians by asserting that native girls begin bearing children at 8 or 9, that births at 12 or 13 were common. Indian medical men argued that the average age of puberty in India was 12, that births under 15 were rare. But incontestable was a 1929 census report which revealed 2,600 births in the U. S. to mothers under 14.

*Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Jersey, Rhode Island, South Dakota.

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