Re: A group of pro life people exposed planned parenthood for the hypocritical scum b
I didn't say they lack decision-making skills altogether. It was interesting to read your citations, but I don't think that deciding about one's medical treatment is the same as starting a family or driving a car. The auto insurance companies, every single on of the the States, and every country that I know of has age limits for drivers because kids don't have the maturity of judgment to make them safe drivers, safe drinkers, nor voters, nor parents. Argue it if you like, but would you loan your car to a couple of 14 year old boys? If they had a case of beer? And they wanted your 13 year old daughter to go with them?
I think that odd, since this issue is directly related to the issue of being able to offer informed consent to medical treatment. Your citation of age restrictions in every country is descriptive, not prescriptive, unless we would claim that no age restriction is valid or acceptable because of the vastly differing and varying age restrictions set in various countries. For instance, the drinking age is 21 in the United States, but 18 elsewhere, and 16 in some countries. The fact that the age limit of 21 is in the minority would not be an argument against the drinking age of 21 unless we could make a
prescriptive judgment regarding the value of lower drinking ages rather than a
descriptive observation of their existence. Leading in from that topic, I would say that though youth drinking is more widespread in Europe, youth
binge drinking is more widespread here, and I would prefer that more youth drink in moderation, thus deriving the health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption, than that a lesser number of youth binge drink until they vomit. Hence, I would tend to say that if youth do not possess the maturity of judgment to drink responsibly, it is because of an abnormally high drinking age that denies them the possibility of learning to imbibe responsibly.
As for the issue of driving, I would say that teenage drivers are unjustly discriminated against for driving offenses that have more to do with socioeconomic status than age.
http://home.earthlink.net/~mmales/teendriv.doc
I would also venture to say that certain forms of traffic violations committed by youth are higher due to police bias than to objective facts.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/driving/article5282700.ece
Older drivers are six times more likely to be fined for speeding than a decade ago, according to a study which also reveals that young motorists have adapted far better to the increased use of speed cameras.
The number of older offenders may be higher partly because, unlike a police officer, a speed camera has no discretion, the study author says. Most speed enforcement a decade ago was carried out by traffic police, who often gave older drivers a verbal warning rather than a ticket.
The Department for Transport commissioned the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) to analyse the age of offenders in two three-year periods: 1997-99 and 2003-05.
It found that the number of men aged 60 and over receiving penalty points for speeding increased by 540 per cent between those periods. Among women aged 60 and over, there was a 1,200 per cent rise, though starting from a very low base.
By contrast the number of drivers under 25 being caught for speeding grew by only 18 per cent.
The study, based on an analysis of the records of 300,000 motorists, also showed that in 2003-05 there were almost three times as many drivers aged 60 and over with speeding convictions as drivers aged under 25. In the 1997-99 period, young offenders outnumbered older ones by more than two to one.
The age group most likely to have a speeding conviction changed from 24-34 in the earlier period to 45-59 in the later period.
The number of speed cameras increased from fewer than 500 in 1997 to about 5,000 in 2005. The increase was partly due to changes in funding rules in 2000 that allowed police to keep a proportion of fines to pay for the cameras. That system, known as “cash for cameras”, was abolished last year.
Speeding convictions from cameras grew from 337,000 in 1997 to a peak of 1.91 million in 2004, before declining to 1.74 million in 2006.
Jeremy Broughton, author of the study, said that the low number of older drivers being prosecuted for speeding in the 1990s might be explained in part by police showing more leniency to them than to young drivers. “Police would have a mental image of the sort of person they were expecting to stop and if it was an elderly lady they wouldn’t look at her in the same way as a young male,” he said.
Rob Gifford, director of the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety, said that older drivers had been accustomed to driving on roads without cameras and would have found it harder to adapt when they spread across the country.
“Police may have given elderly drivers a telling-off rather than a fine whereas cameras are blind to the age of the driver,” he said. “It was wrong to be lenient with older drivers because they were posing a danger on the roads by ignoring the limit. Since the growth in cameras, the proportion of vehicles breaking the 30mph limit has fallen from 75 per cent to 30 per cent and deaths have fallen sharply.”
Mr Gifford said that the rise in older speeding offenders helped to explain the emergence of a vociferous anticamera campaign dominated by drivers in their fifties and sixties.
Paul Watters, head of roads policy at the AA Motoring Trust, said that older drivers had grown up with a different attitude to speed. “They were more used to driving at a speed they judged to be safe according to the conditions rather than sticking to the legal speed limit,” he added. “Older drivers have also had to cope with the introduction on many roads of lower speed limits imposed for environmental purposes.”
As for voting, I think it odd that you would make such a claim, considering that voting competence is based on the ability to make rational and informed decisions about the future, and the studies I provided directly affirmed that ability. I also find it curious that youth are discriminated against under a double standard that apparently judges them sufficiently capable of being criminally prosecuted as adults, but not possessing equivalent rights, and paying the same taxes as adults with similar employment status would pay, yet not possessing voter rights. I do believe an insurrection that led to the founding of the United States was based on "taxation without representation."
Once again you have mischaracterized what I said. Those people did what they thought they had to for survival--and I'm not judging that--but I am saying that we now know that it's not necessary for us to risk pregnancies in early teen girls. Your attempt to make my statement into a "rational objection" or a "recommendation" for people to put off procreation till 30 or 40 years of age is nonsense. Nothing in my post suggested that in any way. The truth however is that people do procreate later in life now that it's possible to live longer (just so you understand: I'm not saying they should do that or that we make it the law, I'm just commenting on what is happening).
I don't see what "risk" teenage pregnancy generally poses. You could argue that there's a physical risk due to the still-underdeveloped cervix of very young adolescents, but this is a problem easily overcome through a C section, and others with physical difficulties in giving birth to children are aided, not vilified.
I think it likely that you will refer to the "economic circumstances" of teenage parenthood, which is itself a somewhat overhyped phenomenon. A
sociological analysis of Hotz et al. is most prominently characterized by a quotation from the study.
Our results suggest that much of the “concern” that has been registered regarding teenage childbearing is misplaced, at least based on its consequences for the subsequent educational and economic attainment of teen mothers. In particular, our estimates imply that the “poor” outcomes attained by such women cannot be attributed, in a causal sense, primarily to their decision to begin their childbearing at an early age. Rather, it appears that these outcomes are more the result of social and economic circumstances than they are the result of the early childbearing of these women. Furthermore, our estimates suggest that simply delaying their childbearing would not greatly enhance their educational attainment or subsequent earnings or affect their family structure… For most outcomes, the adverse consequences of early childbearing are short-lived. For annual hours of work and earnings, we find that a teen mother would have lower levels of each at older ages if they had delayed their childbearing (emphasis mine).
Regardless, to the extent that adolescent women are incapable of providing for their children, (and again, this trend appears to be more closely related with poverty than with age), it is due to their economic disenfranchisement through child labor and compulsory schooling laws, and would be reversed were those restrictions not present.
