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Understanding Ellen White

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    Statement 7: Great difference in age of marriage partners

    A cause of generational decline is marriages between men and women “whose ages widely differ.” Marriages between “old men” and “young wives” result in men living longer, while the wife’s life may be shortened by the burden of caring for an aging husband. 34EGW, Selected Messages, 2:423, 424. Conversely, when young men marry older women, their children may be born with physical and mental weaknesses. 35Ibid., 423, reprinted from EGW, Health: How to Live (1865), No. 2, 29. This is abundantly documented today. As a woman’s age at childbearing increases, the likelihood of birth defects, particularly Down syndrome, also increases. 36Lisa A. Croen et al., “Maternal and Paternal Age Risk of Autism Spectrum Disorders,” Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine 161, no. 4 (2007): 334-340. Remarkably, White also implies detrimental effects to children of older men who father children by younger women. 37EGW, Selected Messages, 2:423. Only long after she wrote was it scientifically established that older fathers also increase the risk of birth defects and autism. 38Paul D. Thacker, “Biological Clock Ticks for Men, Too: Genetic Defects Linked to Sperm of Older Fathers,” Journal of the American Medical Association 291 (2004): 1683-1685; cf. New England Journal of Medicine 347, no. 18 (October 2002): 1449-1451; Jenny Hope, “Birth Defect Risk ‘Rises With Age of the Father,’” London Daily Mail, July 21, 2005, accessed February 8, 2006, www.ndss.org/content.cfm?fuseaction=​NwsEvt​.Article​&article=1325; M. B. Lauritsen, C. B. Pedersen, and P. B. Mortensen, “Effects of Familial Risk Factors and Place of Birth on the Risk of Autism: A Nationwide Register-based Study,” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 46, no. 9 (2005): 963-971. On this topic, White’s instruction appears to have been in advance of the scientific knowledge of her day.UEGW 185.3

    Her statements about spouses of widely differing ages do not suggest that such marriages are always ill-advised. She specifically approved of several such marriages, suggesting that other factors can outweigh the issue of age differences. 39EGW, The Retirement Years (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 1990), 114-120. For example, W. C. White was forty when he married Ethel May Lacey, twenty-one. She bore him five children, the youngest when she was forty and he was fifty-nine. 40Ellen G. White Encyclopedia, ed. Denis Fortin and Jerry Moon (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 2013), s.v. “White, Francis Edward Forga (1913-1992).”UEGW 185.4

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