...and you know for certain that the news agency has no religious staff?

Even if you are religious, this is not news. Nun is pregnant. So? Nuns are normal women, and just like normal women they can get pregnant. This just means the nun had sex about 9 months ago. Thats not exactly news worthy if you ask me.

..but it made the news all the same.

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..but it made the news all the same.

Which is why I said that this just seems like a contrived way of the news agency to turn something that is not actually news into news.

You have to laugh at this

You couldn't Make it up!

Sounds like hes a fan of good old Pat from the US.

...

As a man, I find it extraordinary that a woman can be 9 months pregnant and not know about it, but gynecological matters are not for these boards given the PG14 rating. What is fairly likely is that if she is keeping the child, she will be leaving the convent, else have it adopted.

Seeing as sex ed is taught in the UK in year 7 (age 11-12) and even here in Canada in the same year I think it can be covered to some degree on a pg14 message board. When sex ed isn't taught before puberty you get unwanted pregnancies because they don't know how to not get pregnant. So one can assume that somewhere along the line the nun was denied the basic human right of understanding her own body. Hence not knowing that she would get pregnant from sex and/or knowing that she was pregnant.

Has that sort of thing happened before? Absolutely. In the dark ages of the first half of the 20th Century when women weren't taught sex ed, weren't allowed to get contraception outside of marriage without permission from their husbands. The sort of cruel dark ages that the right wing in America want to send us back to.

It totally doesn't surprise me that a nun was the victim of the forced ignorance that many women suffered not so long ago.

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Reality Internet Personality

I'd just like to point out that you don't know if she was the victim of 'forced ignorance' or whether the symptoms of pregnancy were just not clearly noticeable. The BBC article does point out the fact that she thought she just had stomach pains and that the other nuns were surprised by the news. That does seem to indicate that her pregnancy was far from obvious.

Also, are there really people in their 30's that don't know that sex can get you pregnant? Because that is quite a stretch. Sure, teens that don't know it is one thing, but this is someone who has been around for several decades. Even in the most sheltered Christian environment you know by the age of 30 that sex is the way to make babies.

I'd just like to point out that you don't know if she was the victim of 'forced ignorance' or whether the symptoms of pregnancy were just not clearly noticeable. The BBC article does point out the fact that she thought she just had stomach pains and that the other nuns were surprised by the news. That does seem to indicate that her pregnancy was far from obvious.

That's true. Some very obese people can miss the signs of a pregnancy...and some people carry the child differently.

Also, are there really people in their 30's that don't know that sex can get you pregnant? Because that is quite a stretch. Sure, teens that don't know it is one thing, but this is someone who has been around for several decades. Even in the most sheltered Christian environment you know by the age of 30 that sex is the way to make babies.

I know people that are in their 70s now that weren't aware about where the babies were coming from for a long time. Its how things used to be in the "good ole days"

Its more difficult now (in our culture at least) to remain ignorant. Half an hour of watching HBO should put people in the picture pretty quickly, however distorted from reality that picture might be. However, nuns are cloistered and some don't have TVs, so it actually wouldn't completely surprise me if they really didn't know what was going on.

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Reality Internet Personality

Its more difficult now (in our culture at least) to remain ignorant. Half an hour of watching HBO should put people in the picture pretty quickly, however distorted from reality that picture might be. However, nuns are cloistered and some don't have TVs, so it actually wouldn't completely surprise me if they really didn't know what was going on.

Yeah but Nuns aren't born into a convent. And especially today, people don't join straight when they are 18 or something. Furthermore, nuns tend to be pretty well educated, seeing how many of them work in hospitals or teach at schools. And again, I can't imagine that no one there noticed a huge swollen belly or thought that was just a bad case of eating to much. So clearly the pregnancy wasn't all that obvious.

At least once a year, in the UK, a young girl will give birth to a full term baby without realising that she was pregnant. This is because she has clung to the myths surrounding how a woman gets pregnant, such "you can't get pregnant if its your first time", or "you can't get pregnant doing it standing up" (and many more far more graphic. This is in a country where, as Ess says, sex education is given to all youngsters in year 7. These girls haven't understood the education, in some (few) cases it is because they aren't capable of understanding, but more commonly because they put "peer education" over "real education". They refuse to believe that adults know more about the function of the human body than they, and their peers do, with consequences that haunt them for the rest of their lives :-(

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

At least once a year, in the UK, a young girl will give birth to a full term baby without realising that she was pregnant. This is because she has clung to the myths surrounding how a woman gets pregnant, such "you can't get pregnant if its your first time", or "you can't get pregnant doing it standing up" (and many more far more graphic. This is in a country where, as Ess says, sex education is given to all youngsters in year 7. These girls haven't understood the education, in some (few) cases it is because they aren't capable of understanding, but more commonly because they put "peer education" over "real education". They refuse to believe that adults know more about the function of the human body than they, and their peers do, with consequences that haunt them for the rest of their lives :-(

Yeah, but that kind of self delusion also requires that the common symptoms of pregnancy are not clearly noticeable. No one can honestly convince themselves and their surroundings that they are not pregnant when their belly swells up like a balloon. And that the morning sickness and all the other symptoms are not that bad or obvious. And its not like one can confuse a pregnant girl for simply being very fat all of a sudden. Unless maybe they are already morbidly obese. But again, in those cases the symptoms of pregnancy are not that clear so even if you do know how pregnancy works, you might not realize it.

Its more difficult now (in our culture at least) to remain ignorant. Half an hour of watching HBO should put people in the picture pretty quickly, however distorted from reality that picture might be. However, nuns are cloistered and some don't have TVs, so it actually wouldn't completely surprise me if they really didn't know what was going on.

Yeah but Nuns aren't born into a convent. And especially today, people don't join straight when they are 18 or something. Furthermore, nuns tend to be pretty well educated, seeing how many of them work in hospitals or teach at schools. And again, I can't imagine that no one there noticed a huge swollen belly or thought that was just a bad case of eating to much. So clearly the pregnancy wasn't all that obvious.

"The young mother, who is originally from El Salvador, reportedly named her newborn Francis after the current Pope."

I'm not familiar with the level of sex education given in El Salvador.

At least she is not being forced to give it up for adoption. That's one of the great evils inflicted on women of the years by the Catholic Church. I can't imagine many things worse than being forced to give away your own children.

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Reality Internet Personality

At least once a year, in the UK, a young girl will give birth to a full term baby without realising that she was pregnant. This is because she has clung to the myths surrounding how a woman gets pregnant, such "you can't get pregnant if its your first time", or "you can't get pregnant doing it standing up" (and many more far more graphic. This is in a country where, as Ess says, sex education is given to all youngsters in year 7. These girls haven't understood the education, in some (few) cases it is because they aren't capable of understanding, but more commonly because they put "peer education" over "real education". They refuse to believe that adults know more about the function of the human body than they, and their peers do, with consequences that haunt them for the rest of their lives :-(

In the UK their parents can opt them out of sex ed and a surprising amount do.

Mainly on religious grounds, which is yet another thing I find disgusting about religion.

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Reality Internet Personality

When I was more closely involved in youth work than I am my team worked with had at least three girls who did not understand the signs of pregnancy, and these were not girls in the "lacking the intelligence" to understand, they just didn't understand what was going on in their own bodies. Indeed one of them showed very few signs of being pregnant, her body shape barely changed over the nine months, and she had virtually no (if any) morning sickness, and that was probably masked to a certain extent by a D&V bug that was doing the rounds.

I've also known "mature women" who have been pregnant for over six months before they showed any change in body shape, and I'm not talking about "large" ladies - how a woman's body shape changes during pregnancy appears to be very random.

So do not assume the "big belly when pregnant" urban myth, its one that has caused more problems than nearly all the other myths put together.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

Add to the numbers of youngsters who's parents opt them out the number who opt out by not listening "because its cool not to listen" or bunk-off because "they know it all" and it gets even scarier...

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

When I was more closely involved in youth work than I am my team worked with had at least three girls who did not understand the signs of pregnancy, and these were not girls in the "lacking the intelligence" to understand, they just didn't understand what was going on in their own bodies. Indeed one of them showed very few signs of being pregnant, her body shape barely changed over the nine months, and she had virtually no (if any) morning sickness, and that was probably masked to a certain extent by a D&V bug that was doing the rounds.

I've also known "mature women" who have been pregnant for over six months before they showed any change in body shape, and I'm not talking about "large" ladies - how a woman's body shape changes during pregnancy appears to be very random.

So do not assume the "big belly when pregnant" urban myth, its one that has caused more problems than nearly all the other myths put together.

Exactly, as I've already said, some women carry the baby differently.

You couldn't tell I was pregnant from the back and I didn't look pregnant at all until I was 7 months gone. After that it looked like someone had stuffed a football (soccer ball) under my dress. It totally depends on how the fetus sits in the pelvis area.

Some women don't get sick at all, some like myself vomit for the whole nine months, day and night. There is no such thing as a 'typical' pregnancy.

..and even though I had terrible morning sickness with both my children I didn't initially realise I was pregnant with the second because I thought I just didn't want to go to work in the morning and that was making me feel ill!

The babies movements feel a lot like gas bubbles and some babies move more than others.

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Reality Internet Personality

Add to the numbers of youngsters who's parents opt them out the number who opt out by not listening "because its cool not to listen" or bunk-off because "they know it all" and it gets even scarier...

They generally really like sex ed. Its one of the easier science topics to teach because of that. However, some girls are uncomfortable learning in the same class as boys and are more reluctant to ask questions.

Also some teacher's can be uncomfortable with the topic and that makes it difficult. I've always been of the attitude that if they're old enough to ask, then they're old enough to get an answer, but it can be hard not to get embarrassed at some of the questions asked.

..and the terrifying misconceptions they come with and the fact that some of them as young as 12 are obviously already sexually active.

Denial and cover up is the worst thing that society can do when it comes to preventing teenage pregnancies.

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Reality Internet Personality

When I was more closely involved in youth work than I am my team worked with had at least three girls who did not understand the signs of pregnancy, and these were not girls in the "lacking the intelligence" to understand, they just didn't understand what was going on in their own bodies. Indeed one of them showed very few signs of being pregnant, her body shape barely changed over the nine months, and she had virtually no (if any) morning sickness, and that was probably masked to a certain extent by a D&V bug that was doing the rounds.

How do you recognize that you have a certain illness? You recognize it because you show a specific set of symptoms that are associated with said illness. It doesn't matter if you understand how the illness works, if you show no symptoms you don't just assume that you are sick. The same is true for a pregnancy. If you don't have the obvious symptoms, you are not gonna assume you are pregnant right? And to complicate matters, some of those symptoms are rather common and could be caused by a lot of things. Stomach cramps? Could just as easily be food that didn't go down that well. Or a little stomach flu. And especially if that happens months after you had sex, its not exactly surprising if you don't connect the dots. Even if you had proper sex ed.

Well it seems I didn't know as much about the symptoms of human reproduction as I thought I did!

Yet you probably know more than a lot of the male legislators in America who are making decisions about women's health based on religious reasons and not health reasons.

One of the many things that make me very angry about certain religions.

But it has been discussed sensibly here. Personally I'm glad that apparently she is not being forced to give up the baby for adoption, young babies should be with their natural mother for the bonding process. It isn't clear yet whether she is staying a nun in the convent though. I can't see how she could having broken the the vows she would have taken, whether unintentionally or not.

There is some research being done on the damage that adoption does to both mother and child. Some children never get over being 'rejected' by their mother. Adoption should be a last option where all else has failed.

One of the many things that make me very angry about certain religions that are against contraception and abortion while they pressure women to raise children they didn't want and can't afford or face the trauma of giving that child up for adoption. I find it horrific.

Perhaps I've spent too much time on facebook seeing articles about the struggle women are facing in some states in America due to rise of the religious right there. It has certainly made me feel that religion has no place in a civilised society.

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Reality Internet Personality

Perhaps I've spent too much time on facebook seeing articles about the struggle women are facing in some states in America due to rise of the religious right there. It has certainly made me feel that religion has no place in a civilised society.

Yeah but the religious right is a fringe movement. The fact that they have so much power in the US is not because they have so much popular support, its because those extremists on the fringe are the only ones who bother to get out and vote. Look, democracy is not gonna work when the moderate majority can't be arsed to go to the voting booth and cast their votes.

And you also should not take a fringe movement and use it as what 'the average religious person' is like.

Have you visited the Bible belt, religion down there in some of the towns and cities, is not a fringe activity, it is a way of life you must follow, or get out of town.