Adolescent Arguments in the Abortion Debate

Association for Interdisciplinary Research in Values and Social Change Vol. 17, No. 3 ^ | July/August 2002 | Wanda Franz, Ph.D.

[Humidston]

Very interesting! Thanks, Miltonim.

[nickcarraway]

BUMP

[nickcarraway]

ping

[ChocChipCookie]

bump for later read

[rwfromkansas]

"It has long been known that adolescence is the time when mature cognitive and intellectual abilities are being acquired. This period of time is experienced by the adolescent as one of confusion and frustration as new abilities are made available but are not fully utilized or understood by the adolescent. This is a time when there is an awakening to the internal feelings, needs, emotional drives and intellectual skills which, up until adolescence, function primarily at an unconscious level. What happens to adolescents is that they suddenly become conscious of the functioning of these internal events."

Well....perhaps. But not every teenager is a crazy person. I wasn't when I was one.

Quite frankly, I never went through that "struggling with my identity" crap. I knew who I was even before being a teen.

[rwfromkansas]

BTW, thanks for posting the article.

While I made a side comment, the application of the material to abortion is ingenious.

[Got a right to Life? . . Huh?]

I'll need to study this for my next abortion debate.

[Johnbalaya]

thx, nice post

[concerned about politics]

Liberals really do act like children. Clinton is a 14 year old in a mans body.
When liberals don't get their way, they throw temper tantrums in the streets with all their little play mates. When that doesn't work, they start breaking things.
Liberals do have the minds of children, and should be delt with as such. Parents need to speak up and tell their children "no!" when they're wrong or putting others in danger.
The grown ups in Washington need to protect this nation, and spoiling the missbehaved and unlearned minds is not the way to do it. It just makes them worse. They demand even more candy. They're never full.

[concerned about politics]

I'll need to study this for my next abortion debate.

It appears the challenge is keeping them on topic. Liberals have a short attention span. They start to call you names when they get confused by facts. "You're bad. I hate you. Shut up. I'm telling! You're a poo-poo" (or whatever nasty liberal-speak they can come up with at the time).

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the heads up!

[Tribune7]

bump

[RobbyS]

"Rational parts of the brain?" Pray tell, which parts are these?

[miltonim]

The Amazing Case of Phineas Gage

Phineas Gage was a young railroad construction supervisor in the Rutland and Burland Railroad site, in Vermont. In September 1848, while preparing a powder charge for blasting a rock, he inadvertently tamped a steel rod into the hole. The ensuing explosion projected the tamping rod, with 2.5 cm of diameter and more than one meter of lenght against his skull, at a high speed. The rod entered his head trhough his left cheek, destroyed his eye, traversed the frontal part of the brain, and left the top of the skull at the other side. Gage lost consciousness immediately and started to have convulsions. However, he recovered conscience moments later, and was taken to a local doctor, Jonh Harlow, who took care of him. Amazingly, he was talking and could walk. He lost a lot of blood, but after a bout with infection, he not only survived to the ghastly lesion, but recovered well, too.

Months later, however, Gage began to have startling changes in personality in mood. He became extravagant and anti-social, a fullmouth and a liar with bad manners, and could no longer hold a job or plan his future.  "Gage was no longer Gage", said his friends of him. He died in 1861, thirtheen years after the accident, penniless and epileptic, and no autopsy was performed on his brain. His former physician, John Harlow, interviewed his friends and relatives, and wrote two, reporting Gage's reconstructed medical history, one in 1948, entitled "Passage of an Iron Rod Through the Head", and another in 1868, titled "Recovery from the Passage of an Iron Rod Through the Head".

Phineas Gage became a classical case in the textbooks of neurology. The part of the brain which he had lost, was forever associated to the mental and emotional functions which he had lost. Harlow believed that, as he wrote that "The equilibrium between his intellectual faculties and animal propensities seems to have been destroyed.

His skull was recovered however, and preserved in the Warren Medical Museum of Harvard University. Much later, two Portuguese neurobiologists, Hanna and Antonio Damasio of the University of Iowa, used computer graphics and neural imaging techniques to plot the trajectory of the steel rod as it coursed through Gage's brain, and published the results in Science, in 1994. They discovered that most of the damage was done to the ventromedial region of the frontal lobes on both sides. The part of the frontal lobes responsible for speech and motor functions was apparently spared, so they concluded that the changes in social behavior observed in Phineas Gage were probably due to this lesion, because the Damasios have observed the same sort of change in other patients with similar lesions, causing a defect in rational decision making and the processing of emotion.

[Skooz]

Excellent. Bookmarked. Thanks for posting.

[jwalsh07]

Bump

[concerned about politics]

Months later, however, Gage began to have startling changes in personality in mood. He became extravagant and anti-social, a fullmouth and a liar with bad manners, and could no longer hold a job or plan his future. "Gage was no longer Gage", said his friends of him. He died in 1861, thirtheen years after the accident, penniless

Ohhh noooo. He became a Democrat.

[Question_Assumptions]

Bump for later.

[MHGinTN]

Thank you very much for the ping. I'm printing the 'corrected' version of the article for my stepdaughter and wife to read. Great article, BTW, miltonim.