Teen Girls and Their Moms

Silence is Acceptance?

Adolescent females whose mothers do not vocalize disapproval of them having sex face a higher odd of being diagnosed with a sexually transmitted infection or disease.

An analysis of Add Health data found that adolescents'' previous infection with an STD was the most likely predictor of subsequent infection. Therefore, teaching preventative behaviors to adolescents newly diagnosed with an STD would be an effective means of preventing further infection. The study also found that girls whose mothers did not disapprove of their daughters having sex were more likely to report having an STD. Girls who reported that adults care about them were one-third less likely to report having an STD. Notably, condom use at first or most recent intercourse had no bearing on reported STDs.1

1Longitudinal Prediction of Sexually Transmitted Diseases Among Adolescents: Results from a National Survey, American Journal of Preventative Medicine, 2000, 18 (4).

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.