Pat asked, "any clue on why the increase in birth defects?" when haredi
families increased to very large numbers.

This is out of my area of expertise but my impression was that in general
birth defects increase with number of children, as they also do with maternal
age.  Any of the docs or knowledgeable others want to comment?

There was a Supreme Court case, I forget how it came out, about the
questionable church/state separation in an upstate New York town called New
Square, where a haredi community formed a special public school district in
order to help fund the special education needed for their very high number of
disabled children;  in newspaper coverage of that case this phenomenon was
discussed also.

Elisheva

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