Abortion, Crime & Juveniles

This post from the Crime & Consequences blog looks at the extreme contradiction exhibited by the American Psychological Association which argues that juveniles are mature enough to decide for themselves about having an abortion but not mature enough to know they are committing crimes; the sad result of ideology driving policy.

An excerpt.

"The lead article in this month's issue of the American Psychologist is an article titled Are Adolescents Less Mature than Adults? The article attempts to reconcile the contradictory positions of the American Psychological Association highlighted by Justice Scalia in his dissent in Roper v. Simmons: “[T]he American Psychological Association (APA), which claims in this case that scientific evidence shows persons under 18 lack the ability to take moral responsibility for their decisions, has previously taken precisely the opposite position before this very Court. In its brief in Hodgson v. Minnesota, 497 U.S. 417 (1990), the APA found a "rich body of research" showing that juveniles are mature enough to decide whether to obtain an abortion without parental involvement.” Simmons at 617 (Scalia, J. dissenting)

“Since those lines were laid to text, the American Psychological Association has tried to defend its position that when it comes to obtaining an abortion, the scientific evidence shows that adolescents posses the cognitive capacity to make that choice free from parental consent yet when it comes to the criminal punishment, juveniles as a categorical group, are insufficiently mature to be subject to the full range of criminal sanctions available under the law. The article in this month's American Psychologist claims to demonstrate how these positions are compatible despite the robust intuition that they simply can't be.

“To accomplish this feat, the authors suggest that when it comes to decisions about abortion, what matters are abilities that they call cognitive capacity. These are considered abilities which permit logical reasoning about moral, social, and interpersonal matters and can be sufficiently measured by examining working memory, verbal fluency, and short-term memory. Likewise, they posit that when it comes to decisions related to criminal matters - such as whether it is legally and morally wrong to murder someone, as Simmons did - those abilities reflect more on psychosocial maturity. And those latter abilities are under-developed in most adolescents.”