Pros And Cons Of Adolescents: Making Medical Choices

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Do adolescents have the right to make autonomous medical choices?
To decide whether or not adolescents have a right to make autonomous medical decisions, we must first define adolescence. Technically, adolescence begins when children hit puberty. Although concise, that definition is not very helpful because the logical reasoning centers of adolescent brains develop at different for everyone. Sadly, “the single biggest reason that adolescents give for avoiding necessary health care treatment [is] the belief that [their medical condition] would go away” (Arshagouni). This indicates that if the average adolescent were given medical autonomy based on the commencement of puberty, they would not be prepared to make an informed and logical decisions. Adolescents should gradually be given medical autonomy based on their intelligence and decision making capabilities.
The majority of research designed to address youth medical autonomy has been focused on whether children are capable of making medical decisions--not whether they want to. A 2014 study asked 4th graders and high schoolers to imagine that they had been hit by a car on the way home from school, and after ten days, they had a broken and severely infected leg. The participants were randomly assigned to either make their own treatment decision or to have their parent’s decide. …show more content…
“Laws in twenty-eight states and the District of Columbia confer limited adult status [to] pregnant young women” (Mutcherson 263). While this is a very specific circumstance, these states acknowledge youth take on different responsibilities at different ages and that those that are responsible for a child inside of them should also be responsible for their own medical care. This situation illustrates the need for a flexible system to assess the cognitive capacity of youth to make their own medical
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