Teen Brains

The article below confirms what I have suspected for a long time. My personal knowledge regarding this subject comes from having 2 teens of my own and from the difficulty I have in getting the 14 year old pregnant girls at Lois' Lodge to deal with the reality of their situation.

Summary: Teen Brain Not Fully Developed

Teens lack the cognitive controls needed for mature behavior. According to recent research findings, the brain isn’t fully mature until a person reaches about 25 years of age.

An article written by Time Magazine focuses on recent research conducted by Dr. Jay Giedd, chief of brain imaging in the child psychiatry branch at the National Institute of Mental Health. Dr. Giedd has devoted the past 13 years of his career to studying the brain growth and development in kids and teenagers. Dr. Giedd has used his research to study certain behavior in teens. Because of his research, what was once blamed on as being “raging hormones” in teens is now being seen as the by-product of two factors: an excess amount of hormones and a lack of the cognitive controls needed for mature behavior. One surprising finding that scientists have discovered is that the teenage brain grows very little over the course of childhood. By the time a child is 6 years old, the brain is 90% to 95% of its adult size. Babies are born equipped with most of the neurons our brain will ever have. Human achieve their maximum brain-cell density between the third and sixth month of gestation. During the final months before birth, our brains undergo a dramatic “pruning” in which unnecessary brain cells are eliminated. Many neuroscientists now believe that autism is the result of insufficient or abnormal prenatal “pruning”. What Dr. Giedd’s long-term studies have found is that there is a second wave of “pruning” that occurs later in childhood and that the final, critical part of this second wave, affecting some of our highest mental functions, occurs in the late teens. During adolescence, there are fewer but faster connections in the brain. The brain becomes a more efficient machine but the trade-off is that the brain is also possibly losing some of its raw potential for learning and its ability to recover from trauma. Right about the time the brain switches from proliferating to “pruning”, the body comes under the hormonal effects of puberty. Dr. Giedd’s best estimate for when the brain is truly mature is 25 years of age. For parents, Dr. Giedd says that it might be more useful to help teens make up for what their brain still lacks by providing structure, organizing their time, guiding them through tough decisions (even when they resist) and applying plenty of patience and love.1

1What Makes Teens Tick?, Time Magazine, May 2, 2004, pp. 1-8.

Banquet Testimony

For those of you that did not get to hear Zeritha's powerful testimony at our recent banquet you can hear her story as presented at Central Church of God by clicking here:

http://cdn.libsyn.com/ccog/LoranLivingston-070506-1830-OutreachMinistry.mp3

Men and Abortion Pain

LifeNews.com 11/28

National Conference on Pain Men Experience After Abortion Starts Wednesday in San Francisco, CA (LifeNews.com)

The emotional pain women feel from abortions is well-documented, with more than 40 percent experiencing severe depression and drug and alcohol abuse occurring at higher rates compared with women who give birth.

The pain men experience as a result of abortion will finally be highlighted at a national conference Wednesday. The Knights of Columbus and the Archdiocese of San Francisco are co-sponsoring the first national conference to focus on the effects of abortion on men whose partners had abortions. Featuring an international panel of speakers, the "Reclaiming Fatherhood" conference will be held Nov. 28-29 at St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco. The Milwaukee-based Office of Post-Abortion Reconciliation, headed by Vicki Thorn, is organizing the conference. Thorn is highly-regarded as one of the first and most experienced post-abortion counselors in the nation and she tells LifeNews.com the conference hopes to bring to light the "invisible" pain of men and abortion. She says society at large and even in the churches and pro-life community, the profound effect that abortion has on fathers whose children are aborted is not often acknowledged or understood.

Abortion Targets Blacks

Report: Abortions Target Blacks (LifeNews.com 11/25)

The new report the Centers for Disease Control released this week about annual abortion figures in the United States shows abortions continue to target black women more so than other ethnic groups.

The 2004 report also shows about 10 percent of all abortions in the United States are done with the dangerous RU 486 abortion drug. The CDC shows a majority of women who get abortions are white (53 percent) compared with 35 percent done on African-Americans, 8 percent on women of other ethnic backgrounds and the race of the woman was unknown in four percent of the cases. However, the abortion ratio for black women (472 per 1,000 live births) was 2.9 times higher than the ratio for white women (161 per 1,000). Examined another way, nearly half of all pregnancies among black women end in abortion while just 16 percent of pregnancies among while women end in abortion. The abortion rate for black women (28 per 1,000 women) was 2.8 times the rate for white women (10 per 1,000) -- meaning a much greater percentage. Those statistics continue to worry pro-life leaders in the African-American community. On 27 reporting areas adequately obtained abortion stats by ethnicity and those areas showed that 19 percent of the women getting abortions were Hispanic -- with a low of 0.6% in Mississippi to a high of 50% in New Mexico. For Hispanic women in these reporting areas, the abortion ratio was 211 per 1,000 live births, and the abortion rate was 26 per 1,000 women. However, only 46% of Hispanic women in the United States resided in these reporting areas.

Abstinence Education Funding

From: NC Abstinence Network ncabstinence@bellsouth.net
To: Pregnancy Resource Centers

Subject: Abstinence Education Alert
Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2007 11:22:58 -0500

Dear Friends,

I don’t mean to inundate you with e-mails. You are too busy for that. But there has been a surprising new challenge to the already meager abstinence education funding that North Carolina receives.Planned Parenthood is calling on Governor Easley to reject federal abstinence money. As you know, 14 states have already done this. Read this editorial written by the CEO of Planned Parenthood of Central NC’s that was in the Raleigh News and Observer on Wednesday of this week.

www.newsobserver.com/print/wednesday/opinion/story/797647.html

Please keep a watchful eye out for similar appeals in your local papers. Perhaps begin work on a letter to the editor (200 words) or guest editorial (700 words) that you can submit if this happens—a staff member or volunteer might like to help with this. I have attached a sample guest editorial to help with some of the groundwork, but please rewrite in your own words and add your own anecdotes. Also you might consider writing a letter to the governor or asking your board or supporter so do so. Here is his contact information.

www.governor.state.nc.us/Contact.asp

We knew this fight would reemerge, but most people believed it would not be so soon. My prayers are with you as you work on the front lines.

Warmest regards,

Traci

It's Perfectly Inappropriate

It’s Perfectly Inappropriate

Taken from American Life League news release:

“How can anyone claim that this book is appropriate for 10 year olds?” asked Jim Sedlak, vice president of American Life League. “First, pixilated images and excerpts of the book were rejected by a state prison, and now video streaming sites are censoring the content of a video containing those pixilated images as well.”

Sedlak was referring to the Planned Parenthood endorsed book, It’s Perfectly Normal, by Robie Harris. A few months ago, a Washington state prison rejected a letter that included censored images from the book for being “sexually explicit” and “obscene.” Last week, American Life League posted a video report on several streaming video sites exposing the content of the book, which is aimed at 10 year old children. The video report was removed from vidilife.com, sharkle.com, and hi5.com for “inappropriate content,” and flagged on metacafe.com for viewers over 18.

“What an irony that censored content from a book intended for 10-year-old children is rejected by a prison, removed from video streaming sites and flagged for viewers over the age of 18,” said Sedlak. “We actually have no objection to the actions of the online sites and the prison. We agree that this is not appropriate content.

“We are calling for libraries, schools and parents all across the country to take similar action,” Sedlak said. “Planned Parenthood should be denied access to our children at all times. The material it promotes is totally inappropriate and could be harmful.”

American Life League’s video report can be viewed here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuUmsZYWnrs

Abuse Increases When Mom's Boyfriend Moves In

CitizenLink 11/20/07

Research shows abuse increases when mom's boyfriend moves in.

Child abuse in America is at a high, and experts warn the perpetrators tend to fit into one category.

Reports show children living in households with unrelated adults — usually their mom and her boyfriend — are more likely to be sexually abused, and 50 times more likely to die of injuries, than children living with their biological parents.

“The demographers estimate that a child who’s born out of wedlock will have something like five or six different father figures and co-residents in their household or in their mother’s life before the age of 16," said Robin Wilson, a professor at Washington and Lee University professor. She said the boyfriend may see the child as a threat.

University of Virginia Professor Brad Wilcox told Family News in Focus that men often step into father-like shoes they are not ready to fill.

“It’s a very simple idea; it’s an idea that’s quite old," he said, "but we have to be attentive to the kinds of adults that we’re putting in contact with our children.”

Changing Family Structure Puts Children at Risk

CitizenLink 11/20

Changing Family Structure Puts Children at Risk by Devon Williams, associate editor

Research stresses importance of children being raised by their married biological parents.

A growing number of children are living in homes that are not conducive to their overall health and welfare, according to Glenn Stanton, director of global family formation studies at Focus on the Family.

“We find more and more kids being raised in homes that are unfortunately not suited to the well-being of children, but addressing and fitting the whims of adults, like cohabiting homes and single-parent homes,” he told Family News in Focus.

Stanton draws his conclusions from research compiled in a new report, Family Formation Trends and Analysis, that shows while most children are still being raised by their married biological parents, the trend is moving the opposite direction.

Stanton reports that 40 percent of cohabiting-couple homes include children – and the number is steadily increasing. At the same time, family form has replaced parental employment as the primary driver in child poverty.