Health
The Pennsylvania Dutch generally do not proselytize and discourage intermarriage. Because of close consanguinity, certain genetic problems occur more frequently. Dr. D. Holmes Morton has established the Clinic for Special Children to study and treat families with these problems.
The plain sects typically prohibit insurance, and they assist each other charitably in case of sickness, accident, or property damage. Internal Revenue Service Form 4029 allows one to claim exemption to Social Security taxes under certain very restrictive conditions, and members of the plain sects neither pay the taxes nor receive death, disability, or retirement benefits from social security.
Read more about this topic: Plain People
Famous quotes containing the word health:
“Publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them. They are not even now as concerned about the health of their fame as men are, and, speaking generally, will pass a tombstone or a signpost without feeling an irresistible desire to cut their names on it.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“Most days I feel like an acrobat high above a crowd out of which my own parents, my in-laws, potential employers, phantoms of “other women who do it” and a thousand faceless eyes stare up.”
—Anonymous Mother. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 2 (1978)
“The ideal of men and women sharing equally in parenting and working is a vision still. What would it be like if women and men were less different from each other, if our worlds were not so foreign? A male friend who shares daily parenting told me that he knows at his very core what his wife’s loving for their daughter feels like, and that this knowing creates a stronger bond between them.”
—Anonymous Mother. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 6 (1978)